Edna had dropped her crimsoned face in her hands, but Mrs. Murray raised it forcibly and kissed her.

“I want you to know how well he loves you—­how necessary you are to his happiness.  Now I must leave you, for I see Mrs. Montgomery’s carriage at the door.  You have a note to answer; there are writing materials on the table yonder.”

She went out, closing the door softly, and Edna was alone with surroundings that pleaded piteously for the absent master.  Oxalis and heliotrope peeped at her over the top of the lotos vases; one of a pair of gauntlets had fallen on the carpet near the cameo cabinet; two or three newspapers and a meerschaum lay upon a chair; several theological works were scattered on the sofa, and the air was heavy with lingering cigar-smoke.

Just in front of the Taj Mahal was a handsome copy of Edna’s novel, and a beautiful morocco-bound volume containing a collection of all her magazine sketches.

She sat down in the crimson-cushioned armchair that was drawn close to the circular table, where pen and paper told that the owner had recently been writing, and near the ink-stand was a handkerchief with German initials, S. E. M.

Upon a mass of loose papers stood a quaint bronze paper-weight, representing Cartaphilds, the Wandering Jew; and on the base was inscribed Mr. Murray’s favorite Arabian maxim:  “Ed dunya djifetun ve talibeha kilabi”:  “The world is an abomination, and those who toil about it are dogs.”

There, too, was her own little Bible; and as she took it up it opened at the fourteenth chapter of St. John, where she found, as a book-mark, the photograph of herself from which the portrait had been painted.  An unwithered geranium sprig lying among the leaves whispered that the pages had been read that morning.

Out on the lawn birds swung in the elm-twigs, singing cheerily, lambs bleated and ran races, and the little silver bell on Huldah’s pet fawn, “Edna,” tinkled ceaselessly.

“Help me, O my God! in this the last hour of my trial.”

The prayer went up meaningly, and Edna took a pen and turned to write.  Her arm struck a portfolio lying on the edge of the table, and in falling loose sheets of paper fluttered out on the carpet.  One caught her eye; she picked it up and found a sketch of the ivied ruins of Phyle.  Underneath the drawing, and dated fifteen years before, were traced, in St. Elmo’s writing, those lines which Henry Soame is said to have penned on the blank leaf of a copy of the “Pleasures of Memory”: 

  “Memory makes her influence known
   By sighs, and tears, and grief alone. 
   I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong
   The vulture’s ravening beak, the raven’s funereal song! 
   She tells of time misspent, of comfort lost,
   Of fair occasions gone forever by;
   Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crossed,
   Of many a cause to wish, yet fear to die;
   For what, except the instinctive fear
   Lest she survive, detains me here,
   When all the ‘Life of Life’ is fled?”