An awful stillness pervaded the apartment:  Venetia herself, with a face paler even than the hangings of the mysterious bed, stood motionless with suppressed breath, gazing on the distant curtain with a painful glance of agitated fascination.  At length, summoning her energies as if for the achievement of some terrible yet inevitable enterprise, she crossed the room, and averting her face, and closing her eyes in a paroxysm of nervous excitement, she stretched forth her arm, and with a rapid motion withdrew the curtain.  The harsh sound of the brass rings drawn quickly over the rod, the only noise that had yet met her ear in this mystical chamber, made her start and tremble.  She looked up, she beheld, in a broad and massy frame, the full-length portrait of a man.

A man in the very spring of sunny youth, and of radiant beauty.  Above the middle height, yet with a form that displayed exquisite grace, he was habited in a green tunic that enveloped his figure to advantage, and became the scene in which he was placed:  a park, with a castle in the distance; while a groom at hand held a noble steed, that seemed impatient for the chase.  The countenance of its intended rider met fully the gaze of the spectator.  It was a countenance of singular loveliness and power.  The lips and the moulding of the chin resembled the eager and impassioned tenderness of the shape of Antinous; but instead of the effeminate sullenness of the eye, and the narrow smoothness of the forehead, shone an expression of profound and piercing thought.  On each side of the clear and open brow descended, even to the shoulders, the clustering locks of golden hair; while the eyes, large and yet deep, beamed with a spiritual energy, and shone like two wells of crystalline water that reflect the all-beholding heavens.

Now when Venetia Herbert beheld this countenance a change came over her.  It seemed that when her eyes met the eyes of the portrait, some mutual interchange of sympathy occurred between them.  She freed herself in an instant from the apprehension and timidity that before oppressed her.  Whatever might ensue, a vague conviction of having achieved a great object pervaded, as it were, her being.  Some great end, vast though indefinite, had been fulfilled.  Abstract and fearless, she gazed upon the dazzling visage with a prophetic heart.  Her soul was in a tumult, oppressed with thick-coming fancies too big for words, panting for expression.  There was a word which must be spoken:  it trembled on her convulsive lip, and would not sound.  She looked around her with an eye glittering with unnatural fire, as if to supplicate some invisible and hovering spirit to her rescue, or that some floating and angelic chorus might warble the thrilling word whose expression seemed absolutely necessary to her existence.  Her cheek is flushed, her eye wild and tremulous, the broad blue veins of her immaculate brow quivering and distended; her waving hair falls back over her forehead, and rustles like a wood before the storm.  She seems a priestess in the convulsive throes of inspiration, and about to breathe the oracle.  The picture, as we have mentioned, was hung in a broad and massy frame.  In the centre of its base was worked an escutcheon, and beneath the shield this inscription: