Coming for her amaryllis, she had found the Lily of Annunciation. For the light fell upon Redruth silent as a stone, the white hair waving round his brow scarcely less gray, by contrast stiller ; the hand hanging over the chair, still grasping the stem of his glass, while the bowl lay shattered on the floor; the face open-eyed, shrunken, and upturned with the mute, patient appeal of the dead; the alabaster vase still there, the flame within burned out; and the whole cold figure bathed in the richest odors of the world's bright belt, the breath of tangled jungle, brake, and forest, and wrapped in all the gorgeous beauty of the tropics.

XIX.

THE FACE IN THE FLASH.

A

WEEK crept through the hushed house,

and the funeral of Mr. Redruth was held with every honor, a provision settled upon his widow, and his son installed in his place. Shocked, but not deeply touched, — which would have been improbable, — Miriam's elastic spirits soon regained their equilibrium, and she employed herself to divert Sir Rohan's mind, and dissipate the shadow. She was yet too young and free to own the harvests of sorrow; nor did she know, if this had been a sorrow admitting such end, how to follow in the wild, and lead up to clearer heights; she would seek, instead, to bring one where he stood before. But Sir Rohan needed little of either treatment.

It had been scarcely affection so much as custom that bound him to the old steward, and one

shrinks at the sudden sundering of any tie. With all his love for his master, Redruth had never been able to endear himself sufficiently to produce a real grief at his loss; for through fear of offence, he had refused those opportunities which, well used, would have been friendship. The quality we call moral courage is necessary to finished success, and poor Redruth's life had been a failure. Still Sir Rohan felt that he, also, had owed a duty which he had rejected, and he hoped, proportionately with that neglect, to meet his responsibility for the next. He was moved by the old man's affection and sincerity, no less than by his weakness, and he knew it would have been monstrous for him to blame a living being. Thus it did not take long to heal the wound, and having been much delayed, the time was once more appointed for their departure. St. Denys assisted his friend in such instruction as the new steward required, and again the hours slipped by too happily for counting, each one like a drop from the fabled elixir of life.

One only discord jarred upon this period. At the close of a certain day which had fled, like the days of the Blessed Gods, on the vans of inextin

guishable laughter, a milder mood fell, one of deep quiet and satisfaction. A perfect space where each, aware of the great love in either's thought, preserves silence regarding it, and glances only on indifferent things. Sir Rohan stood at an open casement, folding Miriam in his arms, and saying little where a lingering kiss or closer pressure brimmed the lapse of happy thought. He did not dream of the surrender St. Denys had made in giving her to him. She was all his own. The past lay veiled and blank behind him, to be redeemed by a future that could multiply nothing but virtue; with such blessedness, the seed of that future, into what blossom would it burst!

A dry thunder-cloud had swept over the sky, and still tinged with the vanished light, was loftily heaping its cyclopean cumuli in the likeness of rolling petals, as if assuming shape from some huge magnolia growing unseen in the lost Atlantis. In its base silent lightnings pavilioned themselves, now and then leaping to earth with a rosy flare, and giving to all things, as the night grew deeper, a somewhat weird semblance.

Remaining thus, Sir Rohan remembered the sudden consternation that smote him when first he

knew of the Ghost; the awe and heavy fear, annihilating doubt and following him like a second shadow; the stolidity in which he steeled himself till the edge of his terrors was blunted thereat; the keen watchfulness of intervening years harassed by her influence that bred only a ceaseless pain which he learned to endure; the frantic spasms of that season which had fevered him. He remembered all those hours, and compared them with this where he stood calm and whole, throbbing only with joy, and possessing the cordial of his transudation, sovereign, sweet, and inexhaustible. He wondered if without the past he could have measured the present; he chafed only that these moments were not immortal, or that together they might not slip the knot of life and wander free through fields of eternity too narrow to drain such love.

In the swift gleams he looked down at Miriam, her face on his arm, her lids fallen, glowing, dreaming, smiling, finding heaven with him as he with her; and in a stiller, intenser love he bent above her till she raised the languid splendor of her eyes and returned that passionate inspection.

Other flashes shot across them there, but if the