welcomeless faces, Maltravers passed into his study: and as soon as the
logs burned and the bustle was over, and he was left alone, he took up
the light and passed into the adjoining library. It was then about nine
o'clock in the evening; the air of the room felt damp and chill, and the
light but faintly struggled against the mournful gloom of the dark
book-lined walls and sombre tapestry. He placed the candle on the table,
and drawing aside the curtain that veiled the portrait, gazed with deep
emotion, not unmixed with awe, upon the beautiful face whose eyes seemed
fixed upon him with mournful sweetness. There is something mystical
about those painted ghosts of ourselves, that survive our very dust!
Who, gazing upon them long and wistfully, does not half fancy that they
seem not insensible to his gaze, as if we looked our own life into them,
and the eyes that followed us where we moved were animated by a stranger
art than the mere trick of the limner's colours?

With folded arms, rapt and motionless, Maltravers contemplated the form
that, by the upward rays of the flickering light, seemed to bend down
towards the desolate son. How had he ever loved the memory of his
mother! how often in his childish years had he stolen away, and shed wild
tears for the loss of that dearest of earthly ties, never to be
compensated, never to be replaced! How had he respected, how sympathized
with the very repugnance which his father had at first testified towards
him, as the innocent cause of her untimely death! He had never seen
her,--never felt her passionate kiss; and yet it seemed to him, as he
gazed, as if he had known her for years. That strange kind of inner and
spiritual memory which often recalls to us places and persons we have
never seen before, and which Platonists would resolve to the unquenched
and struggling consciousness of a former life, stirred within him, and
seemed to whisper, "You were united in the old time." "Yes!" he said,
half aloud, "we will never part again. Blessed be the delusion of the