[Footnote 1:
Com' io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
Tant' era ivi lo'ncendio senza metro.

_Del Purgatorio_, xxvii. 49.]

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had
visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being
there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her
son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking
upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them,
kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share
in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year
that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home.
There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight--she had put out
her candles--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:
there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing
down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil
beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard
to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it
must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen stood
before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker