topped short,
and added quickly: 'However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me, to
Ellinor. Go; it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.'

"'Too late!'--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily
down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which
concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house and sought
Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading to find her alone. There was a
little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat in
the morning. Thither I took my course. That room,--I see it still!--the
walls covered with pictures from her own hand, many were sketches of the
haunts we had visited together; the simple ornaments, womanly but not
effeminate; the very books on the table, that had been made familiar by
dear associations. Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together
the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to
her the 'Prometheus.' Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries,
perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had
knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was
the home of my heart.

"Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought would be the air round a home
to come. I looked about me, troubled and confused, and, halting timidly,
I saw Ellinor before me, leaning her face on her hand, her cheek more
flushed than usual, and tears in her eyes. I approached in silence, and
as I drew my chair to the table, my eye fell on a glove on the floor. It
was a man's glove. Do you know," said my father, "that once, when I was
very young, I saw a Dutch picture called 'The Glove,' and the subject
was of murder? There was a weed-grown, marshy pool, a desolate, dismal
landscape, that of itself inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And
two men, as if walking by chance, came to this pool; the finger of one
pointed to a blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on
each other, as if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale.
The picture had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so
uneasy and fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why?
My dear Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those
questions on which we may ask 'why' forever. More chilled than I had
been in speaking to her father, I took heart at last, and spoke to
Ellinor."

My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into
the r