except
for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the
ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other
portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa
to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures
while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung
up in her chamber.

The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
constellations which she had seen shining brightly almost overhead in
the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had
burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She
started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long
remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great
fear seized her, and she sprang for a match. It broke with the quick
movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend
were after her. It flashed and went out. Oh the terror, the terror! The
darkness seemed alive with fearful presences. The lurid glare of her own
eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain. She tried one more match; it
kindled as it should, and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse
was to assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects
around her. She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride. The
beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition
in her eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned the light upon the
pale face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it
seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering,
caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and
the flattened reptiles on which it stood.

In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors.
Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of
life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called,
in our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened
beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid
animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the
lusty lovers of complete muliebrity. The other,--how delicate,