reath
In a great pool; a slumb'rous vale beneath,
And blue damps prickling into white fire-flies."

No sweet-lipped, low-browed Madonnas, no rapt Cecilias, no holy Johns
nor meek Stephens, no reeling Satyrs nor vine-clad _Bacchantes_
relieved the eye, weary of mountain ghylls, red-ribbed deserts, and
stormy surfage.

One long narrow picture baffled interpretation, and excited
speculations that served in some degree to divert the sad current of
the physician's thoughts.

It was a dreary plain, dotted with the "fallen cromlechs of
Stonehenge," and in front of the desecrated stone altars stood a
veiled woman, with her hands clasped over a silver crescent-curved
knife, and her bare feet resting on oaken chaplets and mistletoe
boughs, starred and fringed with snowy flowers. Under the dexterously
painted gauze that shrouded the face, the outline of the features was
distinctly traceable, end behind the film,--large, oracular, yet
mournful eyes, burned like setting stars, seen through magnifying
vapors that wreathe the horizon.

It was a solemn, desolate, melancholy picture, relieved by no flush of
color,--gray plain, gray distance, gray sky, gray temple tumuli, and
that ghostly white woman, gazing grimly down at the gray-haired
sufferer on the low bed beneath her.

Under some circumstances, certain pictures seem basilisk-eyed,
riveting a gaze that would gladly seek more agreeable subjects, and it
chanced that Dr. Grey found a painful fascination in this piece of
canvas that hung immediately in front of him. Wherein consisted the
magnetism that so powerfully attracted him, he could not decide, but
several times when the wind blew the scalloped edge of the lace
curtain between the lamp and the picture, and threw a dim wavering
shadow over the figure on the wall, he almost expected to see the veil
float away from the stony face, and reveal what the artist had
adroitly shrouded. Now it looked a doomed "Norma," and anon the
Nemesis of a dishonored faneless faith, that was born among Magi, and
had tutored Pythagoras; and finally Dr. Grey rose and turned away to
escape its spectral spell.

Waking Katie, he charged her to call him if any change occurred in his
patient, and went to the front of the house for a breath of fresh
air.

Narcissus-like, a three-quarter moon was staring down at her own
image, rocked on the bosom of the sea, while dim stars printed silver
photographs on the deep blue beneath them,--

"And th