Christopher turned his back upon the window, and there were the hitherto beaming candle-flames shining no more radiantly than tarnished javelin-heads, while the snow-white lengths of wax showed themselves clammy and cadaverous as the fingers of a corpse.  The leaves and flowers which had appeared so very green and blooming by the artificial light were now seen to be faded and dusty.  Only the gilding of the room in some degree brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside, stray darts of light seizing upon it and lengthening themselves out along fillet, quirk, arris, and moulding, till wasted away.

‘It seems,’ said Faith, ’as if all the people who were lately so merry here had died:  we ourselves look no more than ghosts.’  She turned up her weary face to her brother’s, which the incoming rays smote aslant, making little furrows of every wrinkle thereon, and shady ravines of every little furrow.

‘You are very tired, Faith,’ he said.  ’Such a heavy night’s work has been almost too much for you.’

‘O, I don’t mind that,’ said Faith.  ’But I could not have played so long by myself.’

’We filled up one another’s gaps; and there were plenty of them towards the morning; but, luckily, people don’t notice those things when the small hours draw on.’

‘What troubles me most,’ said Faith, ’is not that I have worked, but that you should be so situated as to need such miserable assistance as mine.  We are poor, are we not, Kit?’

‘Yes, we know a little about poverty,’ he replied.

While thus lingering

   ‘In shadowy thoroughfares of thought,’

Faith interrupted with, ’I believe there is one of the dancers now!—­why, I should have thought they had all gone to bed, and wouldn’t get up again for days.’  She indicated to him a figure on the lawn towards the left, looking upon the same flashing scene as that they themselves beheld.

‘It is your own particular one,’ continued Faith.  ’Yes, I see the blue flowers under the edge of her cloak.’

‘And I see her squirrel-coloured hair,’ said Christopher.

Both stood looking at this apparition, who once, and only once, thought fit to turn her head towards the front of the house they were gazing from.  Faith was one in whom the meditative somewhat overpowered the active faculties; she went on, with no abundance of love, to theorize upon this gratuitously charming woman, who, striking freakishly into her brother’s path, seemed likely to do him no good in her sisterly estimation.  Ethelberta’s bright and shapely form stood before her critic now, smartened by the motes of sunlight from head to heel:  what Faith would have given to see her so clearly within!

‘Without doubt she is already a lady of many romantic experiences,’ she said dubiously.

‘And on the way to many more,’ said Christopher.  The tone was just of the kind which may be imagined of a sombre man who had been up all night piping that others might dance.