Southern noontide, winter twilight lost themselves again, as Vivia gazed, in the soft starry gleam of an April midnight.  A quiet room, dimly lighted by a flame that dying eyes no longer see; two figures kneeling, one at either side of the mother,—­the little apple-blossom of a mother brought up to die among her own people,—­one shaking with his storm of sobs, the other supporting the dear, weary head on his strong breast, and stifling his very heart-beat lest it stir the frail life too roughly.  And the mother lifts the lids of her faint eyes, as when a parting vapor reveals rifts of serene heaven, gazes for a moment into the depths of her first-born’s tenderness, gropes darkly for his fingers and for the hot little hand thrust eagerly forth to meet hers, closes one about the other, and folds them both upon her own heart.  Then Beltran bends and gathers from the lips the life that kindled his.  With a despairing cry, Ray flings himself forward, and dead and living lie in Beltran’s arms, while the strong convulsion of his heart rends up a hollow groan from its emptiness.  And Vivia draws aside the curtain, and the gentle wind brings in the sweet earthy scent of fresh furrows lately wet with showers, and the ever-shifting procession of the silent stars unveil themselves of gauzy cloud, and glance sadly down with their abiding eyes upon these fleeting shadows.

After all, who can deny that there is magic in a mirror, a weird atmosphere imprisoned, between the metal and the glass, borrowing the occult powers of the gulf of space, and returning to us our own wraith and apparition at any hour of the day or night when we smite it with a ray of light,—­reaching with its searching power into the dark places where we have hidden ourselves, and seizing and projecting them in open sight?  Who doubts that this sheeny panel on so many walls, with wary art slurring off its elusive gleam, could, at the one compelling word, paint again the reflections of all on which it silently dreams in its reticent heart,—­the joy, the grief, the weeping face, the laughing lip, the lover’s kiss, the tyrant’s sneer, almost the crouched and bleeding soul on which that sneer descended, of which some wandering beam carried record?  When we remember the violin, inwardly ridged with the vibrations of old tunes, old discords, who would wonder to find some charactery of light tracing its indelible script within the crystal substance?  And here, if Vivia saw one other scene blaze out before her and vanish, why not believe, for fancy’s sake, that it was as real a picture as the image of the dark and beautiful girl herself bending there with the carmine stain upon her cheek, the glowing, parted lips, the shining eyes, the shadowy hair?