n saddest I had but
just to shut my eyes and feel again falling soft and warm on my lids,
lingering, loving, interpenetrating my soul with its glow;--and this,
oh, 't was like a blade cleaving that same brain with swift, sharp
flash! I flew into the house, but Effie was almost there before me,--and
on my way, falling, gliffered in the gloom, against something, I
snatched me back with a dim feeling that 't was Angus, and yet Angus had
followed Effie in. I slipped among the folk and sat down somewhere at
length like as if stunned.

It was question of passing the time, that went round; for, though all
their words fell dead on my ear at the moment, it was in charactery that
afterward I could recall, reillume, and read; and one was for games, and
one for charades, and one for another thing;--and I sat silent and dazed
through it all. Finally they fell to travestying scenes from history,
each assuming a name and supporting it by his own wits, but it all
passed before my dulled senses like the phantasmagoria of a troubled
dream; and that tiring, there was a kind of dissolving views managed by
artful ebb and flow of light, pictures at whose ending the Rose of May
was lost in Francesca, who, waxing and waning in her turn, faded into
Astarte, and went out In a shudder of darkness,--and the three were
Effie. But ere the views were done, ere those three visions, when Effie
ran away to dress her part, I after her and up into our room, vaguely,
but as if needs must.

"I've good news for you," said she, without looking, and twisting her
long, bright hair. "I was with Angus but now in the garden. He can bear
it no longer, and he touched my brow with his lips that I promised to
urge his cause; for he loves you, he loves you, Alice! Am I not kind to
think of it now? Ah, if you knew all!"

She had already donned the gown of silvery silk and blonde, and was
winding round her head the long web of lace loosened from my mother's
broidery-frame. She turned and took me by the two shoulders, and looked
into my face with eyes of azure flame.

"I am wild with gladness!" she said. "Kiss me, girl, quick! there's no
time to spare. Kiss me on the cheek,--not the lip, not the lip,--_he_
kissed me there! Kiss me the cheek,--one, and the other! So, brow,
cheeks, mouth, and your kisses all have signed me with the sign of the
cross. Oh, girl, I am wild with joy!"

She spoke swift and high, held me by the two shoulders with a clasp like
steel, suddenl