Mona shivers. Getting up from her lowly position, she draws back the curtains of her window and looks out upon the night. It is brilliant with moonlight, clear as day, full of that hallowed softness, that peaceful serenity, that belongs alone to night.
She is enchanted, and stands there for a minute or two spellbound by the glory of the scene before her. Then a desire to see her beloved lake from the great windows in the northern gallery takes possession of her. She will go and look at it, and afterwards creep on tiptoe to the library, seize the book she had been reading before dinner, and make her way back again to her room without any one being in the least the wiser. Anything will be better than sitting here any longer, dreaming dismal day-dreams.
She beckons to the dogs, and they, coming up to her, follow her out of the room and along the corridor outside their soft velvet paws making no sound upon the polished floor. She has brought with her no lamp. Just now, indeed, it would be useless, such "a wide and tender light," does heaven's lamp fling upon floor and ceiling, chamber and corridor.
The whole of the long north gallery is flooded with its splendor. The oriel window at its farther end is lighted up, and from it can be seen a picture, living, real, that resembles fairy-land.
Sinking into the cushioned embrasure of the window, Mona sits entranced, drinking in the beauty that is balm to her imaginative mind. The two dogs, with a heavy sigh, shake themselves, and then drop with a soft thud upon the ground at her feet,—her pretty arched feet that are half naked and white as snow: their blue slippers being all too loose for them.
Below is the lake, bathed in moonshine. A gentle wind has arisen, and little wavelets silver-tinged are rolling inward, breaking themselves with tender sobs upon the shore.
"The floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
The floor itself is pale, nay, almost blue. A little snow is sifted lightly on branch, and grass, and ivied wall. Each object in the sleeping world is quite distinct.
"All things are calm, and fair, and passive; earth
Looks as if lulled upon an angel's lap
Into a breathless, dewy sleep; so still
That we can only say of things, they be."
The cold seems hardly to touch Mona, so wrapped she is in the beauties of the night. There is at times a solemn indefinable pleasure in the thought that we are awake whilst all the world sleepeth; that we alone are thinking, feeling, holding high communion with our own hearts and our God.