After pacing to and fro for some moments, her dark and kindling eye alone betraying the excitement which her colorless cheek denied, Matilda again took up the light, and having once more approached the portrait, was in the act of raising the veil, when a slight noise made by Gerald, who in his anxiety to obtain a better view of her, had made a change in his position, arrested her ear; and she turned and fixed her eye upon the window, not with the disturbed manner of a person who fears observation, but with the threatening air of one who would punish an intrusion.

Holding the light above her head, she advanced firmly across the room, and stopping beneath the window, fixed her eye steadily and unshrinkingly upon it.  The mind of Gerald had become a chaos of conflicting and opposing feelings.  Only an instant before and he would have coveted recognition, now his anxiety was to avoid it; but cramped in his attitude, and clinging as he was compelled, with his face close to the bars, his only means of doing so was by quitting his position altogether.  He therefore loosened his hold, and dropped himself on the mound of earth from which he had contrived to ascend, but not so noiselessly, in the unbroken stillness of the night, as to escape the keen ear of the American.  In the next moment Gerald heard a door open, and a well known voice demand, in tones which betrayed neither alarm nor indecision.

“Who is there?”

The question was repeated in echo from the surrounding woods, and then died away in distance.

“Who of my people,” again demanded Matilda, “has dared to follow me here in defiance of my orders?”

Another echo of indistinct sounds, and all again was still.

“Whoever you are, speak,” resumed the courageous girl.  “Nay,” she pursued more decidedly, as having moved a pace or two from the door, she observed a human form standing motionless beneath the window.  “Think not to escape me.  Come hither slave that I may know you.  This curiosity shall cost you dear.”

The blood of Gerald insensibly chilled at the harsh tone in which these words were uttered, and had he followed a first impulse he would at once have retired from the influence of a command, which under all the circumstances, occurred to him as being of prophetic import.  But he had gazed on the witching beauty of the syren, until judgment and reason had yielded the rein to passion, and filled with an ungovernable desire to behold and touch that form once more—­even although he should the next moment tear himself from it for ever—­he approached and stood at the entrance of the temple, the threshold of which Matilda had again ascended.

No exclamation of surprise escaped the lips of the ever-collected American; and yet, for the first time that night, her cheek was suffused with a deep glow, the effect of which was to give to her whole style of beauty a character of radiancy.

“Gerald Grantham!”