panelled; dead but showy white picked out sparingly
with gold. Festoons of fruits and flowers finely carved in wood on some
of the panels. These also not smothered in gilding, but as it were gold
speckled here and there, like tongues of flame winding among insoluble
snow. Ranged against the walls were sofas and chairs covered with rich
stuffs well worn. And in one little distant corner of the long room
a gray-haired gentleman and two young ladies sat round a small plain
table, on which burned a solitary candle; and a little way apart in
this candle's twilight an old lady sat in an easy-chair, thinking of
the past, scarce daring to inquire the future. Josephine and Rose were
working: not fancy-work but needle-work; Dr. Aubertin writing. Every
now and then he put the one candle nearer the girls. They raised no
objection: only a few minutes after a white hand would glide from one
or other of them like a serpent, and smoothly convey the light nearer to
the doctor's manuscript.

"Is it not supper-time?" he inquired. "I have an inward monitor; and I
think our dinner was more ethereal than usual."

"Hush!" said Josephine, and looked uneasily towards her mother. "Wax is
so dear."

"Wax?--ah!--pardon me:" and the doctor returned hastily to his work.
But Rose looked up and said, "I wonder Jacintha does not come; it is
certainly past the hour;" and she pried into the room as if she
expected to see Jacintha on the road. But she saw in fact very little of
anything, for the spacious room was impenetrable to her eye; midway from
the candle to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became
shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended sharp and black, as in those
out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by a certain great painter,
whose Nature comes to a full stop as soon as he has no further
commercial need of her, instead of melting by fine expanse and exquisite
gradation into genuine distance, as nature does in Claude and in nature.
To reverse the picture, if you stood at the door you looked across forty
feet of black, and the little corner seemed on fire, and the fair heads
about the candle shone like the St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an antique
stained-glass window.

At last the door opened, and another candle fired Jacintha's comely
peasant face in the doorway. She put down her candle outside the door,
and started as crow flies for the other light. After glowing a moment in
the doorway she dived into the shadow and emerged