the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt
equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him,
and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent
permission to step in, he had already become more serious.

He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen
that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular
thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For already in the
anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The large halls, which
were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the
grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining
brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared
behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen,
surrounded him. Then he perceived that it came in through the black
velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through
which he was passing.

In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms. His duty must have been
to announce the artist's arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards him
--Korinna's mother.

Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot, she