"Oh!"
This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at length struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the whole of the picture.
"What is it called?" she asked.
"Love stronger than death."
The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon, rising in a livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator was seen a freshly-opened grave. In the foreground were two figures—one that of a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled from her coffin, wrapped as she was in her cerements of the tomb; the other that of the lover. He had propped the body against the broken hillock of the grave, and he was chanting a love-song to it which he accompanied on his lute. His face suggested the last stage of a galloping consumption, further enlivened by the fearsome light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary bats flopped and lollopped through the air, and a few sympathetic toads came out to listen to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as if they swayed and moaned to the music; and the rank weeds and grasses were mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn musician.
Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there followed a shocking inclination to laugh.
"What do you think of it?" Blanchet asked.
"Oh, I don't like it at all."
"No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness; just a striving after drawing-room popularity. No depth of feeling; no care for the realistic power of the scene. Pretty, pleasing—nothing more. Surface only; no depth."
"But it is hideous," Minola said.