I. THE THICKENING OF THE CLOUDS.

I.

ZULMA SARPY.

It was a damp bleak morning, and the snow was falling fast. Zulma Sarpy
sat in her bedroom, indolently stretched upon a rocking chair before a
glowing fire. She was attired in a white morning dress, or _peignoir_,
slightly unbuttoned at the collar, and revealing the glories of a snowy
columnar neck, while the hem, negligently raised, displayed two
beautiful slippered feet half buried in the plush of a scarlet cushion.
Her abundant yellow hair, thrown back in banks of gold over the forehead
and behind the rosy ears, was gathered in immense careless coils behind
her head and kept in position by a towering comb of pearl. Her two arms
were raised to the level of her head, and the two hands held on
languidly to the ivory knobs at the top of the chair. On the second
finger of the left hand was a diamond ring that flashed like a star. The
whole position of the lovely lounger brought out her grand bust into
full relief.

Beside her stood a little round table supported on three carven feet of
exquisite workmanship, and covered by a beautiful netting of crimson
lace. On the table was an open book and several trinkets of female
toilet. The table gave the key to the rest of the furniture of the
apartment, which was massive, highly wrought and of deep rich colors.
The tapestries of the wall were umber and gold; the hangings of the bed
and windows were a modulated purple. The room had evidently been
arranged with artistic design, and just such a one would be employed to
exhibit a statue of white marble to the best effect. Zulma Sarpy was
this living, breathing model, fair as a filament of summer gorse, and
statuesque in all her poses.

She had been educated in France, according to the custom of many of the
wealthy families of the Colony. Although confined for five years--from
the age of fourteen to that of nineteen--in the rigid and aristocratic
convent of Picpus, she had been enabled to see much of Paris life,
during the waning epoch of Louis XVI's reign and the times of morbid
fashionable excitement immediately preceding the great Revolution. Her
natural disposition, and the curiosity incident to her previous Colonial
training, led her to mingle with keen interest in all the forms of
French existence, and her character was so deeply impressed by it that
when she returned to her Canadian home, a few months before our
introduction to her, she was looked upon very much