onal interest in
Reverend Finch. Did he never wish that he had been a priest of the Roman
Catholic Church, mercifully forbidden to marry at all? While the question
passed through my mind, my guide took out a key, and opened a heavy oaken
door at the further end of the passage.

"We are obliged to keep the door locked, ma'am," she explained, "or the
children would be in and out of our part of the house all day long."

After my experience of the children, I own I looked at the oaken door
with mingled sentiments of gratitude and respect.

We turned a corner, and found ourselves in the vaulted corridor of the
ancient portion of the house.

The casement windows, on one side--sunk deep in recesses--looked into the
garden. Each recess was filled with groups of flowers in pots. On the
other side, the old wall was gaily decorated with hangings of bright
chintz. The doors were colored of a creamy white, with gilt moldings. The
brightly ornamented matting under our feet I at once recognized as of
South American origin. The ceiling above was decorated in delicate pale
blue, with borderings of flowers. Nowhere down the whole extent of the
place was so much as a single morsel of dark color to be seen anywhere.

At the lower end of the corridor, a solitary figure in a pure white robe
was bending over the flowers in the window. This was the blind girl whose
dark hours I had come to cheer. In the scattered villages of the South
Downs, the simple people added their word of pity to her name, and called
her compassionately--"Poor Miss Finch." As for me, I can only think of
her by her pretty Christian name. She is "Lucilla" when my memory dwells
on her. Let me call her "Lucilla" here.

When my eyes first rested on her, she was picking off the dead leaves
from her flowers. Her delicate ear detected the sound of my strange
footstep, long before I reached the place at which she was standing. She
lifted her head--and advanced quickly to meet me with a faint flush on
her face, which came and died away again in a moment. I happen to have
visited the picture gallery at Dresden in former years. As she approached
me, nearer and nearer, I was irresistibly reminded of the gem of that
superb collection--the matchless Virgin of Raphael, called "The Madonna
di San Sisto." The fair broad forehead; the peculiar fullness of the
flesh between the eyebrow and the eyelid; the delicate outline of the
lower face; the tender, sensitive lips; the color of the