The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of Seleukus.  Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully to himself.  Never had he felt more fully content—­the gayest of the gay.  One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him with a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had pleased him.  His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body.  As his glance fell on the implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up with the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt equal.  Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him, and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent permission to step in, he had already become more serious.

He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular thing among the various objects worthy of admiration.  For already in the anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him.  The large halls, which were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the grave.  And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen, surrounded him.  Then he perceived that it came in through the black velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through which he was passing.

In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him—­had vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms.  His duty must have been to announce the artist’s arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for, before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards him—­Korinna’s mother.

Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot, she speechlessly signed him to follow her.  Till this moment not even a whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come.  But the only answer was a dumb assenting bow of the head.

He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a spacious room.  It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds of magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the midst stood the couch on which lay the dead girl.  In this hall, too, reigned the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the vestibule.