ingers
and for the hot little hand thrust eagerly forth to meet hers, closes
one about the other, and folds them both upon her own heart. Then
Beltran bends and gathers from the lips the life that kindled his. With
a despairing cry, Ray flings himself forward, and dead and living lie in
Beltran's arms, while the strong convulsion of his heart rends up a
hollow groan from its emptiness. And Vivia draws aside the curtain, and
the gentle wind brings in the sweet earthy scent of fresh furrows lately
wet with showers, and the ever-shifting procession of the silent stars
unveil themselves of gauzy cloud, and glance sadly down with their
abiding eyes upon these fleeting shadows.

After all, who can deny that there is magic in a mirror, a weird
atmosphere imprisoned, between the metal and the glass, borrowing the
occult powers of the gulf of space, and returning to us our own wraith
and apparition at any hour of the day or night when we smite it with a
ray of light,--reaching with its searching power into the dark places
where we have hidden ourselves, and seizing and projecting them in open
sight? Who doubts that this sheeny panel on so many walls, with wary art
slurring off its elusive gleam, could, at the one compelling word, paint
again the reflections of all on which it silently dreams in its reticent
heart,--the joy, the grief, the weeping face, the laughing lip, the
lover's kiss, the tyrant's sneer, almost the crouched and bleeding soul
on which that sneer descended, of which some wandering beam carried
record? When we remember the violin, inwardly ridged with the vibrations
of old tunes, old discords, who would wonder to find some charactery of
light tracing its indelible script within the crystal substance? And
here, if Vivia saw one other scene blaze out before her and vanish, why
not believe, for fancy's sake, that it was as real a picture as the
image of the dark and beautiful girl herself bending there with the
carmine stain upon her cheek, the glowing, parted lips, the shining
eyes, the shadowy hair?

Late spring down on the Maryland farm: you know it by the intense blue
through that quaint window draped with such a lushness of vines, such a
glory of blossom. In at the open door, whose frame is arabesqued with
hanging sprays of sweetbrier, with the pendent nest, with fluttering
moth-wings sunshine-dusted, with crowds of bursting buds, pours the
mellow sun in one great stream, pours from the peach-orchards the
fr