filled her with vague dread and loathing.

When the echo of her retreating footsteps died away, St. Elmo threw
his cigar out of the window, and walked up and down the quaint and
elegant rooms, whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have
adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris, than a country-
house in soi-disant "republican" America. The floor, covered in
winter with velvet carpet, was of white and black marble, now bare
and polished as a mirror, reflecting the figure of the owner as he
crossed it. Oval ormolu tables, buhl chairs, and oaken and
marquetrie cabinets, loaded with cameos, intaglios, Abraxoids, whose
"erudition" would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged
the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of
Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the
universality of what St. Elmo called his "world-scrapings," and to
the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector. On
a verd-antique table lay a satin cushion holding a vellum MS., bound
in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink,
powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff with gilded
illuminations; and near the cushion, as if prepared to shed light on
the curious cryptography, stood an exquisite white glass lamp,
shaped like a vase, and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions
in ultra-marine blue--a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the
Nitrian desert, by the aid of whose rays the hoary hermits, whom St.
Macarius ruled, broke the midnight gloom chanting, "Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison," fourteen hundred years before St. Elmo's birth.
Immediately opposite, on an embossed ivory stand, and protected from
air and dust by a glass case, were two antique goblets, one of
green-veined agate, one of blood-red onyx; and into the coating of
wax, spread along the ivory slab, were inserted amphorae, one dry