Josephine and Rose were
working: not fancy-work but needle-work; Dr. Aubertin writing. Every
now and then he put the one candle nearer the girls. They raised no
objection: only a few minutes after a white hand would glide from one
or other of them like a serpent, and smoothly convey the light nearer to
the doctor's manuscript.
"Is it not supper-time?" he inquired. "I have an inward monitor; and I
think our dinner was more ethereal than usual."
"Hush!" said Josephine, and looked uneasily towards her mother. "Wax is
so dear."
"Wax?--ah!--pardon me:" and the doctor returned hastily to his work.
But Rose looked up and said, "I wonder Jacintha does not come; it is
certainly past the hour;" and she pried into the room as if she
expected to see Jacintha on the road. But she saw in fact very little of
anything, for the spacious room was impenetrable to her eye; midway from
the candle to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became
shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended sharp and black, as in those
out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by a certain great painter,
whose Nature comes to a full stop as soon as he has no further
commercial need of her, instead of melting by fine expanse and exquisite
gradation into genuine distance, as nature does in Claude and in nature.
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