‘Look,’ she whispered, pointing to the hammock.  ’When did you see a prettier picture?’

The young man gazed with a free smile, the expression of critical appreciativeness.  The girl’s beauty stirred in him no mood but that.  She slept with complete calm of feature the half-lights that came through the foliage made an exquisite pallor on her face, contrasting with the dark masses of her hair.  Her bosom rose and fell in the softest sighing; her pure throat was like marble, and her just parted lips seemed to need a protector from the bees....

While she sleeps, let us learn a little more of her history.  Some five-and-twenty years previously, Alfred Redwing was a lecturer on Greek and Latin at a small college in the North of England, making shift to live on a beggarly stipend.  Handsome, pleasing, not quite thirty, he was well received in such semblance of society as his town offered, and, in spite of his defects as a suitor, he won for his wife a certain Miss Baxendale, the daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer.  She brought him at once a few hundreds a year, and lie pursued his college work in improved spirits.  His wife had two brothers; one had early gone to America, the other was thriving as a man of business in the town of Dunfield.  With Laurence Baxendale, who dated his very occasional letters from various parts of the United States, the family might be said to have parted for good; before leaving England he had got on ill terms with his father and brother, and it was only a persistent affection for his sister that caused him to give any sign of himself year after year.  When this sister had been Mrs. Redwing for about two years, she one day received an intimation from solicitors that Laurence was dead and had left her the whole of a very considerable fortune, the product, mainly, of dealings in lumber.  Mr. and Mrs. Redwing in fact found themselves possessed of nearly fourteen thousand a year, proceeding from most orderly investments.  This would naturally involve a change in their mode of life.  In the first place they paid a visit to America; then they settled in London, where, about the same time, their only child, Beatrice was born.  A month after the child’s coming into the world, the father withdrew from it—­into a private lunatic asylum.  He had not been himself from the day when he heard of the fortune that had come to him; such an access of blessedness was not provided for in the constitution of his mind.  Probably few men of his imaginative temperament and hard antecedents could have borne the change without some little unsettling of mental balance; we are framed to endure any amount of ill, but have to take our chance in the improbable event of vast joy befalling us.  Poor Redwing conceived a suspicion that his wife desired to murder him; one night as she was following him into their bedroom, he suddenly turned round, caught hold of her with violence, and flung her to the ground, demanding the knife which he protested he had seen gleam in her hand.  It was no longer safe to live with him; he was put under restraint, and never again knew freedom.  In less than a year he died, a moping maniac.