�Come,� said Doctor Lombard, �let us go before the light fails us.�
Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.
�No, no,� said his host, �my wife will not come with us. You might not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for art—Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian school.�
�Frith�s Railway Station, you know,� said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. �I like an animated picture.�
Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to let her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down a narrow stone passage with another door at its end. This door was iron-barred, and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted another key into the lock, and Doctor Lombard led the way into a small room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by streams of yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the central brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.
�A little too bright, Sybilla,� said Doctor Lombard. His face had grown solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his daughter drew a linen drapery across the upper part of the window.
�That will do—that will do.� He turned impressively to Wyant. �Do you see the pomegranate bud in this rug? Place yourself there—keep your left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord.�
Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind the velvet curtain.
�Ah,� said the doctor, �one moment: I should like you, while looking at the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse. Sybilla—�
Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mother�s, St. Bernard�s invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.