liantly 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, reigned
the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the vestibule.

The dim, shrouded form lying motionless on the couch before him, with a
heavy wreath of lotus-flowers and white roses encircling it from head to
foot, was the subject for his brush. He was to paint here, where he could
scarcely distinguish one plant from another, or make out the form of the
vases which stood round the bed of death. The white blossoms alone
gleamed like pale lights in the gloom, and with a sister radiance
something smooth and round which lay on the couch--the bare arm of the
dead maiden.

His heart began to throb; the artist's love of his art had awaked within
him; he had collected his wits, and explained to the matron that to paint
in the darkness was impossible.

Again she bowed in reply, but at a signal two waiting women, who were
squatting on the floor behind the couch, started up in the twilight, as
if they had sprung from the earth, and approached their mistres