them all.

'O, how wonderful it is!' said Faith, putting her hand on Christopher's
arm. 'Who knew that whilst we were all shut in here with our puny
illumination such an exhibition as this was going on outside! How sorry
and mean the grand and stately room looks now!'

Christopher turned his back upon the window, and there were the hitherto
beaming candle-flames shining no more radiantly than tarnished javelin-
heads, while the snow-white lengths of wax showed themselves clammy and
cadaverous as the fingers of a corpse. The leaves and flowers which had
appeared so very green and blooming by the artificial light were now seen
to be faded and dusty. Only the gilding of the room in some degree
brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside, stray darts of
light seizing upon it and lengthening themselves out along fillet, quirk,
arris, and moulding, till wasted away.

'It seems,' said Faith, 'as if all the people who were lately so merry
here had died: we ourselves look no more than ghosts.' She turned up her
weary face to her brother's, which the incoming rays smote aslant, making
little furrows of every wrinkle thereon, and shady ravines of every
little furrow.

'You are very tired, Faith,' he said. 'Such a heavy night's work has
been almost too much for you.'

'O, I don't mind that,' said Faith. 'But I could not have played so long
by myself.'

'We filled up one another's gaps; and there were plenty of them towards
the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the
small hours draw on.'

'What troubles me most,' said Faith, 'is not that I have worked, but that
you should be so situated as to need such miserable assistance as mine.
We are poor, are we not, Kit?'

'Yes, we know a little about poverty,' he replied.

While thus lingering

'In shadowy thoroughfares of thought,'

Faith interrupted with, 'I believe there is one of the dancers now!--why,
I should have thought they had all gone to bed, and wouldn't get up again
for days.' She indicated to him a figure on the lawn towards the left,
looking upon the same flashing scene as that they themselves beheld.

'It is your own particular one,' continued Faith. 'Yes, I see the blue
flowers under the edge of her cloak.'

'And I see her squirrel-coloured hair,' said Christopher.

Both stood looking at this apparition, who once, and only once, thought
fit to turn her head towards the front of the house they were gazing
fr