. ROSSETTI, _Vain Virtues_.

The face set him to a strange wondering; he sat at the coffin and
watched it. His wife's face it was, and above the sorrow of irrevocable
parting floated the thought that she did not look happy as she lay in
her bed of death. Monross had seen but two dead faces before, those of
his father and mother. Both had worn upon the mask which death models an
expression of relief. But this face, the face of his wife, of the woman
with whom he had lived--how many years! He asked himself why he
shuddered when he looked down at it, shuddered and also flushed with
indignation. Had she ever been happy? How many times had she not voiced
her feelings in the unequivocal language of love! Yet she seemed so
hideously unhappy as she stretched before him in her white robes of
death. Why? What secret was this disclosed at the twelfth hour of life,
on the very brink of the grave? Did death, then, hold the solution to
the enigma of the conquering Sphinx!

Monross, master of psychology, tormented by visions of perfection, a
victim to the devouring illusion of the artist,--Monross asked himself
with chagrin if he had missed the key in which had sounded the symphony
of this woman's life. This woman! His wife! A female creature,
long-haired, smiling, loquacious--though reticent enough when her real
self should have flashed out signals of recognition at him--this wife,
the Rhoda he had called day and night--what had she been?

She had understood him, had realized his nobility of ideal, his gifts,
his occasional grandeur of soul,--like all artistic men he was desultory
in the manifestation of his talent,--and had read aloud to him those
poems written for another woman in the pitch-hot passion of his
youth--before he had met her. To her he had been always, so he told
himself, a cavalier in his devotion. Without wealth, he had kept the
soles of her little feet from touching the sidewalks of life. Upon her
dainty person he had draped lovely garments. Why then, he wondered, the
vindictive expression etched, as if in aqua fortis, upon her carved
features?

Some Old World superstition held him captive as he gazed. Death is the
grand revealer, he thought; death alone stamps upon the crumbling canvas
of mortality the truth. Rhoda was dead. Yet her face was alive for the
first time. He saw its truth; and he shuddered, for he also discerned
the hate that had lurked a life long in its devious and smiling
expressions--expressio