She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue.  Her eyes were fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting.  It was a very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by the first emigrant of her race.  The legs and arms were curiously turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half repulsive.  Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature.  Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich crimson brocade.  Over Myrtle’s bed hung that other portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful souls of the Roman faith.  She had longed for these pictures while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up in her chamber.

The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before.  Her lamp had burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber.  She started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great fear seized her, and she sprang for a match.  It broke with the quick movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend were after her.  It flashed and went out.  Oh the terror, the terror!  The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences.  The lurid glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain.  She tried one more match; it kindled as it should, and she lighted another lamp.  Her first impulse was to assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects around her.  She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride.  The beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she was, as always.  She turned the light upon the pale face of the martyr-portrait.  It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her childhood.  Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.

In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors.  Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of life,—­so it appeared to her,—­yet both had long been what is called, in our poor language, dead.  One came in all the glory of her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete muliebrity.  The other,—­how delicate, how translucent, how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments of her whom the young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.