nes accompanied by the bell-like, rippling notes of the harp.
The company sat entranced--all eyes upon the lovely girl from whose
throat poured the streams of melody.

She seemed but a child; for all she had been married six years she had
but just passed out of her "teens" and might easily have been taken for
a girl of fifteen. Her hair, it is true, was "tucked up," but the
innocence in the upturned, velvet eyes, the soft, childish outlines of
the face, the dimpled hands and arms against the harp's glided strings,
the simple little frock of white dimity, all combined to give her a
"babyfied" look which was most appealing, and which her title of "Mrs.
Poe" seemed rather to accentuate than otherwise.

Rufus Griswold's furtive eye rested balefully upon her. And this
exquisite being too, belonged to that man--as if the gods had not
already given him enough!

From a far corner of the room her husband gazed upon her, and bathed his
senses in contemplation of her beauty while his soul soared with her
song. Mother Clemm noiselessly passing near him to snuff a candle on the
table upon which his elbow, propping his head, rested, paused for a
moment and laid a caressing hand upon his hair. He impulsively drew her
down to a seat beside him.

"Oh, Muddie, Muddie, look at her--look at her!" he whispered. "There is
no one anywhere so beautiful as my little wife! And no voice like hers
outside of Heaven!... Ah--"

What was the matter? Was his Virginia ill? Even as he spoke her voice
broke upon the middle of a note--then stopped. One hand clutched the
harp, the other flew to her throat from which came only an inarticulate
sound like a struggle for utterance. Terror was in the innocent eyes
and the deathly white, baby face.

For a tense moment the little company of birthday guests sat rooted to
their places with horror, then rushed in a mass toward the singer, but
her husband was there first--his face like marble. His arms were around
her but with a repetition of that inarticulate, gurgling sound she fell
limp against his breast in a swoon. From the sweet lips where so lately
only melody had been a tiny stream of blood oozed and trickled down and
stained her pretty white dress.

"Back!--All of you!" commanded the low, clear voice of Edgar Poe, as
with the dear burden still in his arms he sank gently to the floor and
propping her head in his lap, disposed her limbs in comfortable, and her
dress in orderly manner. "Back--don't crow