A spiritual epicure in his pleasures, he would not spoil the effect of the coming meeting, by seeing Euphra in the drawingroom first:  he went to his own study, where he remained till the hour had nearly arrived.  He tried to write some verses.  But he found that, although the lovely form of its own Naiad lay on the brink of the Well of Song, its waters would not flow:  during the sirocco of passion, its springs withdrew into the cool caves of the Life beneath.  At length he rose, too much preoccupied to mind his want of success; and, going down the back stair, reached the library.  There he seated himself, and tried to read by the light of his chamber-candle.  But it was scarcely even an attempt, for every moment he was looking up to the door by which he expected her to enter.

Suddenly an increase of light warned him that she was in the room.  How she had entered he could not tell.  One hand carried her candle, the light of which fell on her pale face, with its halo of blackness —­ her hair, which looked like a well of darkness, that threatened to break from its bonds and overflood the room with a second night, dark enough to blot out that which was now looking in, treeful and deep, at the uncurtained windows.  The other hand was busy trying to incarcerate a stray tress which had escaped from its net, and made her olive shoulders look white beside it.

“Let it alone,” said Hugh, “let it be beautiful.”

But she gently repelled the hand he raised to hers, and, though she was forced to put down her candle first, persisted in confining the refractory tress; then seated herself at the table, and taking from her pocket the manuscript which Hugh had been criticising in the morning, unfolded it, and showed him all the passages he had objected to, neatly corrected or altered.  It was wonderfully done for the time she had had.  He went over it all with her again, seated close to her, their faces almost meeting as they followed the lines.  They had just finished it, and were about to commence reading from the original, when Hugh, who missed a sheet of Euphra’s translation, stooped under the table to look for it.  A few moments were spent in the search, before he discovered that Euphra’s foot was upon it.  He begged her to move a little, but received no reply either by word or act.  Looking up in some alarm, he saw that she was either asleep or in a faint.  By an impulse inexplicable to himself at the time, he went at once to the windows, and drew down the green blinds.  When he turned towards her again, she was reviving or awaking, he could not tell which.

“How stupid of me to go to sleep!” she said.  “Let us go on with our reading.”

They had read for about half an hour, when three taps upon one of the windows, slight, but peculiar, and as if given with the point of a finger, suddenly startled them.  Hugh turned at once towards the windows; but, of course, he could see nothing, having just lowered the blinds.  He turned again towards Euphra.  She had a strange wild look; her lips were slightly parted, and her nostrils wide; her face was rigid, and glimmering pale as death from the cloud of her black hair.