lay dead beneath that velvet pall, but which had arisen to haunt the
hollow caves and cells of her living brain. She rushed away, and up once
more to her silent room, through the darkness which had now settled down
in the house; threw herself again on her bed, and lay almost paralysed
with horror and distress.

"But Teufelsbuerst was not about anything so frightful as she supposed,
though something frightful enough. I have already implied that Wolkenlicht
was, in form, as fine an embodiment of youthful manhood as any old Greek
republic could have provided one of its sculptors with as model for an
Apollo. It is true, that to the eye of a Greek artist he would not have
been more acceptable in consequence of the regimen he had been going
through for the last few weeks; but the emaciation of Wolkenlicht's frame,
and the consequent prominence of the muscles, indicating the pain he had
gone through, were peculiarly attractive to Teufelsbuerst.--He was busy
preparing to take a cast of the body of his dead pupil, that it might aid
to the perfection of his future labours.

"He was deep in the artistic enjoyment of a form, at the same time so
beautiful and strong, yet with the lines of suffering in every limb and
feature, when his daughter's hand was laid on the latch. He started, flung
the velvet drapery over the body, and went to the door. But Lilith had
vanished. He returned to his labours. The operation took a long time, for
he performed it very carefully. Towards midnight, he had finished encasing
the body in a close-clinging shell of plaster, which, when broken off, and
fitted together, would be the matrix to the form of the dead Wolkenlicht.
Before leaving it to harden till the morning, he was just proceeding to
strengthen it with an additional layer all over, when a flash of
lightning, reflected in all its dazzle from the snow without, almost
blinded him. A peal of long-drawn thunder followed; the wind rose; and