ry little more. Now
let us begin breakfast."

The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.

At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to