his hands, were swollen and stood out, but colorless as the keys that stretched beneath.  His calmness chilled her blood.  She thought him dead, and all within her that lived seemed to pass out of her in the will, nay, the power also, to restore him.  She grasped his arm.  He was not dead, then, for he sighed,—­an awful sigh; it shook him like a light reed in the tempest, he shuddered from head to foot; he leaned towards her, as if about to faint, but never removed his close-locked hands from his eyes....  She had only clasped his arm before; as hand met hand, or touch thrilled touch, he shivered, his grasping fingers relaxed in their hold on each other, but closed on hers....  She waited long,—­she listened to his breathing, intermittent with tearless sobs.  At last he gasped violently, a cold tear dropped on her hand, and he thrust it rudely from him.

“’God has taken my punishment into Hiss own hands:  yet I defied not Him, only something made by man, and man himself.’  He spoke loudly, yet in halting words, with gaps of silence between each phrase; then stared wildly round him, and clapped both his hands upon his ears,—­withdrew them,—­closed his ears with his fingers, then dropped his hands, and cast on her a glance that implored—­that demanded—­the whole pity of her heart.  ‘Have mercy!’ were his words; ’I have lost my hearing, and it is forever!’”

The discrimination of character exercised by Miss Sheppard is very wonderful.  Many as are the figures on her stage, they are never repeated, and they are all as separate, as finely edged and bevelled, as gems.  The people grow under her pen,—­whether you take Auchester, developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at length the rare type of manhood which he presents,—­or the one change wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that completest touch of the perfect woman, “like perfume from unseen flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows.”  Perhaps this characterization is most noticeable in “Counterparts,” which she called her small party of opposing temperaments:  Salome, so gracious; Rose, like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion confronting Bernard’s sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to conjecture, wrote the book.  I have always fancied that some mystic trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts, possessed an equal power and sweetness,—­Raphael, Shelley, and Mendelssohn.  And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,—­Bernard, who is exceeded by none in the whole range of romance.  “Counterparts” is a novel of ideal life; it is the land of one’s dreams and one’s delights; its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture