“Oh, my vineyard, come tell me why thy grapes are bitter?  What have I done, my People?  Wherein hast thou been wronged?”

For weeks the elaboration of this sketch had employed every moment which was not demanded for the execution of her allotted daily task in the convict workroom; and knowing that on Monday she would be bereft of her pretty model, she had redoubled her exertions to complete it.

Beside a bier knelt a winged figure, in act of stealing the rigid form, and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch’s weird image of Death.  A white butterfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air—­neither descending nor drifting, but waiting—­poised on outspread pinions, hovered the Angel of the Resurrection holding out his hands.  Behind and beneath the Destroyer, rolled dense shadows, and all the light in this picture rayed out from the plumes above, and fell like a glory on the baby’s face.

Cut off from all congenial companionship, thrown upon her own mental resources, the prisoner had learned to live in an ideal world; and her artistic tastes proved an indestructible heritage of comfort, while memory ministered lavishly with images from the crowded realm of aesthetics.  Victorious over the stony limitations of dungeon walls and dungeon discipline, fetterless imagination soared into the kingdom of beauty, and fed her lonely soul, as Syrian ravens fed God’s prophet.

Fourteen months had passed since Mr. Dunbar walked away from this cell, after the interview relative to Gen’l Darrington’s will; and though his longing to see the prisoner had driven him twice to the entrance of the chapel, whence he heard the marvellously sweet voice, and gazed at the figure before the organ, no word was exchanged.

To-day, with his hand on the bolt of the door, and his heart in his eyes, he leaned against the facing, and through the opening studied the occupant of the cell that held the one treasure which fate had denied him.

The ravages of disease, the blemish of acute physical suffering had vanished; the clear pallor of her complexion, the full white throat, the rounded contour of the graceful form, bespoke complete restoration of all the vital forces; and never had she appeared so incomparably beautiful.

Oppressed by the heat, she had pushed back the hair from her temples, and though hopeless sadness reigned over the profound repose of her features, the expression of her eyes told that the dream of the artist had borne her beyond surrounding ills.

Where the button of her blue homespun dress fastened the collar, she wore a sprig of heliotrope and a cluster of mignonette, from the shallow box in the window-ledge where they grew together.

How long he stood there, surrendering himself to the happiness of watching the woman whom, against his will, he loved with such unreasoning and passionate fervor, Mr. Dunbar never knew; but a sudden recollection of the face printed on the glass, the face, beautiful as fabled Hylas—­of the man for whose sake she was willing to die—­stung him like an adder’s bite; and setting his teeth hard, he rapped upon the door held ajar; then threw it open.