rage and despair of the distorted hideous heads seemed fearfully
real, and years elapsed before she comprehended their significance,
or the sombre mood which impelled their creation. They were
imitations of that monumental lion's head, raised on the battle-
field of Chaeroneia, to commemorate the Boeotians slain. In the rear
of and adjoining the library, a narrow, vaulted passage with high
Gothic windows of stained-glass, opened into a beautifully
proportioned rotunda, and beyond this circular apartment with its
ruby-tinted skylight and Moresque frescoes, extended two other
rooms, of whose shape or contents Edna knew nothing, save the tall
arched windows that looked down on the terrace. The door of the
rotunda was generally closed, but accidentally it stood open one
morning, and she caught a glimpse of the circular form and the
springing dome. Evidently this portion of the mansion had been
recently built, while the remainder of the house had been
constructed many years earlier; but all desire to explore it was
extinguished when Mrs. Murray remarked one day:

"That passage leads to my son's apartments, and he dislikes noise or
intrusion."

Thenceforth Edna avoided it as if the plagues of Pharaoh were pent
therein. To her dazzled eyes this luxurious home was a fairy palace,
an enchanted region, and, with eager curiosity and boundless
admiration, she gazed upon beautiful articles whose use she could
not even conjecture. The furniture throughout the mansion was
elegant and costly; pictures, statues, bronzes, marble, silver,
rosewood, ebony, mosaics, satin, velvet--naught that the most
fastidious and cultivated taste or dilettanteism could suggest, or
lavish expenditure supply, was wanting; while the elaborate and