try, she mounted a narrow stair.
On arriving at a door on the third landing-place, she tapped gently, and
in obedience to a shrill voice, which cried "Come in," she lifted the
latch, and entered a small room, where, at a bench, sat a very peculiar
personage. This was no other than the famous Paul Bennett, an artist in
jewellery, who at that time excelled all his compeers for beauty of
design and exquisite refinement of minute elaboration. And this,
perhaps, a good judge of mankind might have augured of him; for while
his body was far below the middle size, his long thin fingers, tapering
to a point, seemed to be suitable instruments intended to serve a pair
of dark eyes so lustrous and sharp, that nothing within the point of the
beginning of infinitesimals might seem to escape them. Nor was his pale
face less suggestive of his peculiar faculties; for it was made up of
fine delicate features, harmonized into regularity, and so expressive,
that it seemed to change with every feeling of the moment, even as the
flitting moonbeams play on the face of a statue. In addition to these
peculiarities, his appearance was rendered the more striking, that,
working as he did under a strong reflected light, cast down immediately
before his face by a dark shade, the upper part of his person and a
circle on the bench were in bright relief, while the other parts of the
room were comparatively dark.

"Still at work, Paul," said Rachel, as she entered; "how long do you
intend to work to-night?"

"Till the idea becomes dim, and the sense waxes thick," replied he, as
he turned his eyes upon her.

"I have something to tell you," she continued, as she sat down on a
chair between him and the fire, if that could be called such which
consisted of some red cinders.

"Some other wonder," replied he; "another cropping out of the workings
of fate."

Words these, as coming from our little artist, which require some
explanation, to the effect that Paul was a philosopher, too, in his own
way. Early misfortunes, which mocked the resolutions of a will never
very strong, had played into a habit of thinking, and brought him to the
conviction that every movement or change in the moral world, not less
than in the physical, is the result of a cause which runs back through
endless generations to the first man, and even beyond him. Paul was, in
short, a fatalist; not of that kind which romance writers feign in order
to make the character work through a gloo