Murmuring the words, in an ecstasy of passionate fervor, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, she pressed the flower with both hands to her lips, and swooning slowly back upon the cushions, she lay motionless, a shape of glorious pallid beauty, sculptured upon the odorous dusk, as the moon was going down.
As the moon was going down, its pale ray streaming aslant the drooping misty veils that fell in parted festoons from a golden ring above the pure and cloud-like couch of Muriel, threw a tender glory on her Madonna face, sweet in its waven fall of shadowy tresses. She rested, half-reclined upon her side against the broad bank of her pillows, in the soft suffusion of gloomy bloom which insphered her couch from the darkness of the chamber. Her beautiful white arms flowing from an open sleeve, which left them bare nearly to the shoulders, lay along her form upon the silvery grey of the coverlet, and her eyes shone like dim, rich gems. Alone and sleepless, in the still seclusion of her chamber, the phantoms of her many-peopled life thronged her spirit, and the drama of the day lived anew. All the persons she had known from her childhood upward—faces, too, that she had seen and forgotten—came floating in a strange air of dreams upon her vague and pensive musing. All that had passed since morning—the places where she had been, the people she had met, their shapes, their colors, their manners and gestures; what had been said, what had been done—came in spectral retrospection, singularly minute and circumstantial; and now and then, some face, some glimpse of a passing form, some room or fragment of sunlit street, half surprised her by softly appearing to the inner visual sense, with the jut and hues and vivid reality of actual life. Amidst the profuse and teeming phantasmagoria of her thought, came often the strong face of her uncle—with the surly scowl she had last seen upon it, melting into an ominous smile she had never seen, which strangely altered it to the sinister face of the negro-holder. And with this—sometimes preceding it, sometimes following it, and mysteriously connected with it, almost as fantastically as in a dream—came the agonized and imploring dark face of Roux, which somehow seemed changed, and not his so entirely, but that it suggested a likeness to some other face which she could not recall. Following these—recurring again and again, a hundred times, and linked with the inexplicable incident of the evening—came Wentworth, pale, and bitterly laughing, passing, with half-turned, scornful head, through one door; and Emily, melting from haughty scarlet into pallor and tears, and sweeping away, with her face bowed in her hands, through the other. Because it has been played upon—because it has been played upon. The words came with every return of these two figures—came wearily and strangely; darkly significant, yet wholly meaningless, and leaving her in quiet wonder as to what lurked beneath them. In all this spectral picturing, the form of Harrington was absent; and, though several times, conscious of the vivid life of her mind that night, she strove to bring him before her, she could not succeed. But again and again the thought of his love for Emily and of hers for him, came to her, never impressing her so singularly as now. The strange reticence of his demeanor to Emily, courteous, frank, kind and loving, it is true, but yet so unlike the abandonment she might have looked for in a lover; the curious attentions of Emily to him, her lustrous looks into his face, her fond, close leaning on his arm, her form bending so near him, her restless desire to isolate herself with him even when she and Wentworth were present, her low tones and whisperings, and smiles, tokens of love, and yet somehow vaguely unloverlike; all came to her vividly, and like an ordinary page in a book which yet contained a lurking riddle that distracted the mind from the ostensible reading. Then their strange reserve. Emily had never intimated aught of her love to her, save in the conversation which she herself had instituted to charm down her lover-like jealousy, and the admission then was rather tacit than direct. And Harrington, too—he had never breathed a word, or given the remotest hint of his love to her—not even to her, his adored and trusted friend. Why this secrecy? What imaginable reason had they for this close conspiracy of reserve? She could not guess. She could not even invent a plausible supposition to account for it.