The apartment was elegantly furnished, and green and gold tinted all its appointments. On an Egyptian marble table stood a work-box curiously inlaid with malachite and richly gilded, and there lay some withered flowers, a small thimble, and a pair of scissors with mother-of-pearl handles. Around the walls hung a number of paintings, which, with one exception, were landscapes or ocean-views; and as Dr. Grey sat watching the shimmer of lamp-light on their carved frames and varnished surfaces, they seemed to furnish images of

“Green glaring glaciers, purple clouds of pine,
White walls of ever-roaring cataracts;
Blue thunder drifting over thirsty tracts,
Rose-latticed casements, lone in summer lands,—
Some witch’s bower; pale sailors on the marge
Of magic seas, in an enchanted barge
Stranded at sunset, upon jewelled sands.
Some cup of dim hills, where a white moon lies,
Dropt out of weary skies without a breath
In a great pool; a slumb’rous vale beneath,
And blue damps prickling into white fire-flies.”

No sweet-lipped, low-browed Madonnas, no rapt Cecilias, no holy Johns nor meek Stephens, no reeling Satyrs nor vine-clad Bacchantés relieved the eye, weary of mountain ghylls, red-ribbed deserts, and stormy surfage.

One long narrow picture baffled interpretation, and excited speculations that served in some degree to divert the sad current of the physician’s thoughts.

It was a dreary plain, dotted with the “fallen cromlechs of Stonehenge,” and in front of the desecrated stone altars 288 stood a veiled woman, with her hands clasped over a silver crescent-curved knife, and her bare feet resting on oaken chaplets and mistletoe boughs, starred and fringed with snowy flowers. Under the dexterously painted gauze that shrouded the face, the outline of the features was distinctly traceable, end behind the film,—large, oracular, yet mournful eyes, burned like setting stars, seen through magnifying vapors that wreathe the horizon.

It was a solemn, desolate, melancholy picture, relieved by no flush of color,—gray plain, gray distance, gray sky, gray temple tumuli, and that ghostly white woman, gazing grimly down at the gray-haired sufferer on the low bed beneath her.

Under some circumstances, certain pictures seem basilisk-eyed, riveting a gaze that would gladly seek more agreeable subjects, and it chanced that Dr. Grey found a painful fascination in this piece of canvas that hung immediately in front of him. Wherein consisted the magnetism that so powerfully attracted him, he could not decide, but several times when the wind blew the scalloped edge of the lace curtain between the lamp and the picture, and threw a dim wavering shadow over the figure on the wall, he almost expected to see the veil float away from the stony face, and reveal what the artist had adroitly shrouded. Now it looked a doomed “Norma,” and anon the Nemesis of a dishonored faneless faith, that was born among Magi, and had tutored Pythagoras; and finally Dr. Grey rose and turned away to escape its spectral spell.

Waking Katie, he charged her to call him if any change occurred in his patient, and went to the front of the house for a breath of fresh air.

Narcissus-like, a three-quarter moon was staring down at her own image, rocked on the bosom of the sea, while dim stars printed silver photographs on the deep blue beneath them,—

“And the hush of earth and air
Seemed the pause before a prayer.”