'Go on, go on. What occurred?'
'Nothing, save that she stood dumb, like one who had no language save that of another world. But at the second sitting she had a fit of a most dreadful kind.'
'Ah! Tell me quickly,' I said. Her face became suddenly distorted by an expression of terror such as I had never seen and never imagined possible. I have caught it exactly in my picture "Christabel." She revived and tried to run out of the studio. Her mother and I seized her, and she then fell down insensible.'
'What occasioned the fit? What had frightened her?'
'That is what I am not quite certain about. When she entered the studio she fixed her eyes upon a portrait which I had been working upon; but that must have been merely a coincidence.'
'A portrait!' I cried. And Winifred's scared expression when she encountered my mother's look of hate in the churchyard came back to me like a scene witnessed in a flash of lightning. 'The portrait was my mother's?'
'It was the face of the kind, tender, and noble lady your mother,' said Wilderspin gently.
I gave a hurried glance at my mother, and saw the pallor of her face,—but to me the world held now only two realities, Winifred and Wilderspin; all other people were dreams, obtrusive and irritating dreams. 'Go on, go on,' I said.
'She recovered,' continued Wilderspin, 'and seemed to have forgotten all about the portrait, which I had put away.'
'Did she talk?'