arm, dazzling room, with light reflected in long lines of gold from
picture-frames on the wall, and now and then startling patches of
lurid color blazing forth unmeaningly from the dark incline of their
canvases, with gleams of crystal and shadows of bronze in settings
of fretted ebony, with long swayings of rich draperies at doors and
windows, a red light of fire in a grate, and two white lights, one
of piano keys, the other of a flying marble figure in a corner,
outlined clearly against dusky red. The light in this room was very
dim. It was all beyond Ellen's imagination. The White North where
the Norway spruces lived would not have seemed as strange to her as
this. Neither would Bluebeard's Castle, nor the House that Jack
Built, nor the Palace of King Solomon, nor the tent in which lived
little Joseph in his coat of many colors, nor even the Garden of
Eden, nor Noah's Ark. Her imagination had not prepared her for a
room like this. She had formed her ideas of rooms upon her
grandmother's and her mother's and the neighbors' best parlors, with
their glories of crushed plush and gilt and onyx and cheap lace and
picture-throws and lambrequins. This room was such a heterodoxy
against her creed of civilization that it did not look beautiful to
her as much as strange and bewildering, and when she was bidden to
sit down in a little inlaid precious chair she put down her tiny
hand and reflected, with a sense of strengthening of her household
faith, that her grandmother had beautiful, smooth, shiny hair-cloth.

Cynthia Lennox pulled the chair close to the fire, and bade her hold
out her little feet to the blaze to warm them well. "I am afraid you
are chilled, darling," she said, and looked at her sitting there in
her dainty little red cashmere frock, with her spread of baby-yellow
hair over her shoulders. Then Ellen thought that the lady was
younger than her mother; but her mother had borne her and nursed
her, and suffered and eaten of the tree of knowledge, and tasted the
bitter after the sweet; and this other woman was but as a child in
the garden, though she was fairly old. But along with Ellen's
conviction of the lady's youth had come a conviction of her power,
and she yielded to her unquestioningly. Whenever she came near her
she gazed with dilating eyes upon the blazing circle of diamonds at
her throat.

When she was bidden, she followed the lady into the dining-room,
where the glitter of glass and silver and the soft g