e
low-down ruddy light spread over the dark floor like the setting sun
over a moor, fluttering on the grotesque countenances of the bright
andirons, and touching all the furniture on the underside.

She now and then crossed to one of the deep embrasures of the windows,
to decipher some sentence from a letter she held in her hand. The
daylight would have been more than sufficient for any bystander
to discern that the capitals in that letter were of the peculiar
semi-gothic type affected at the time by Somerset and other young
architects of his school in their epistolary correspondence. She was
very possibly thinking of him, even when not reading his letter, for the
expression of softness with which she perused the page was more or less
with her when she appeared to examine other things.

She walked about for a little time longer, then put away the letter,
looked at the clock, and thence returned to the windows, straining her
eyes over the landscape without, as she murmured, 'I wish Charlotte was
not so long coming!'

As Charlotte continued to keep away, Paula became less reasonable in
her desires, and proceeded to wish that Somerset would arrive; then that
anybody would come; then, walking towards the portraits on the wall, she
flippantly asked one of those cavaliers to oblige her fancy for company
by stepping down from his frame. The temerity of the request led her
to prudently withdraw it almost as soon as conceived: old paintings had
been said to play queer tricks in extreme cases, and the shadows this
afternoon were funereal enough for anything in the shape of revenge
on an intruder who embodied the antagonistic modern spirit to such an
extent as she. However, Paula still stood before the picture which had
attracted her; and this, by a coincidence common enough in fact,
though scarcely credited in chronicles, happened to be that one of
the seventeenth-century portraits of which De Stancy had studied the
engraved copy at Myrtle Villa the same morning.

Whilst she remained before the picture, wondering her favourite wonder,
how would she feel if this and its accompanying canvases were pictures
of her own ancestors, she was surprised by a light footstep upon the
carpet which covered part of the room, and turning quickly she beheld
the smiling little figure of Charlotte De Stancy.

'What has made you so late?' said Paula. 'You are come to stay, of
course?'

Charlotte said she had come to stay. 'But I have brought