ving before him a noble task, to which he
felt equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door
to him, and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a
silent permission to step in, he had already become more serious.

He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once
seen that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any
particular thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For
already in the anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The
large halls, which were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were
as still as the grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had
been shining brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had
disappeared behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he
had ever seen, surrounded him. Then he perceived that it came in through
the black velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room
through which he was passing.

In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms. His duty must have been
to announce the artist's arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards
him--Korinna's mother.

Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot,
she speechlessly signed him to follow her. Till this moment not even a
whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and
mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young
painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained
to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come. But the only answer
was a dumb assenting bow of the head.

He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a
spacious room. It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds
of magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the
midst stood the couch on which lay the dead girl. In this hall,
too, reigne