losed it behind me. Then all
was still, and I looked about me.

A candle burned on a deal table in the middle of the room, and the first
thing I saw was the lid of a coffin, as I thought, set up against the
wall; but it opened, for it was a door, and a woman entered. She was all
in white--as white as new-fallen snow; and her face was as white as her
dress, but not like snow, for at once it suggested warmth. I thought her
features were perfect, but her eyes made me forget them. The life of
her face and her whole person was gathered and concentrated in her eyes,
where it became light. It might have been coming death that made her
face luminous, but the eyes had life in them for a nation--large, and
dark with a darkness ever deepening as I gazed. A whole night-heaven
lay condensed in each pupil; all the stars were in its blackness, and
flashed; while round it for a horizon lay coiled an iris of the eternal
twilight. What any eye IS, God only knows: her eyes must have been
coming direct out of his own! the still face might be a primeval
perfection; the live eyes were a continuous creation.

"Here is Mr. Vane, wife!" said the raven.

"He is welcome," she answered, in a low, rich, gentle voice. Treasures
of immortal sound seemed to be buried in it.

I gazed, and could not speak.

"I knew you would be glad to see him!" added the raven.

She stood in front of the door by which she had entered, and did not
come nearer.

"Will he sleep?" she asked.

"I fear not," he replied; "he is neither weary nor heavy laden."

"Why then have you brought him?"

"I have my fears it may prove precipitate."

"I do not quite understand you," I said, with an uneasy foreboding as to
what she meant, but a vague hope of some escape. "Surely a man must do a
day's work first!"

I gazed into the white face of the woman, and my heart fluttered. She
returned my gaze in silence.

"Let me first go home," I resumed, "and come again after I have found or
made, invented, or at least discovered something!"

"He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!" said the
woman, turning to her husband. "Tell him he must rest before he can do
anything!"

"Men," he answered, "think so much of having done, that they fall asleep
upon it. They cannot empty an egg but they turn into the shell, and lie
down!"

The words drew my eyes from the woman to the raven.

I saw no raven, but the librarian--the same slender elderly man, in a
rusty black coa