Dawn may be the egotist’s hour of smug self-congratulation, or the poet’s moment for praising solitude, even though like Thomson he buries his head in a nightcap, and wallows in bed till noon. The dead man had no one as yet to question his quietude, though there was a sense of stirring everywhere—attic windows opening, milk frothing into jugs at kitchen steps, carts lumbering lazily over the cobbles. The sun ascended, the mist began to rise, the sunflowers in a row along the wall had their broad faces made splendid by the day. A couple of thrushes were hopping to and fro over the grass. An inquisitive robin came perking in through the half-shut door, to stand twittering with one black, beady eye cocked curiously at the motionless figure on the floor. In one dark corner a harpsichord showed the ivory of its key-board with something suggestive of a sinister smile. Had that ingenious connoisseur of feminine beauty—Mr. Pepys—taken an early stroll in the park that morning, he might have derived infinite contentment from the sight of a young girl, a “comely black wench,” standing at her open window with nothing but a red cloak to hide the whiteness of her night-gear. She was binding her hair, her eyes gazing over the empty park, a little table at the window beside her full of ribbons, pins, trinkets, and laces. She was wondering whether her father would walk early in the park that morning. She had fallen asleep before he had returned from supping at my Lord Montague’s the night before, though Mrs. Jael—her mother’s woman, had sat up to watch for the flare of links along the street. The garden looked innocent enough in the morning sunlight, with its gravel walks, sleek grass, and quaint bay-trees trimmed into the likeness of pinnacles. The music-room, with its diminutive classic portico, lyre, mask, and trumpets in gilt upon the tympanum, seemed, with its white pillars, no place where tragedy might watch and wait. Whatever impulse drew the girl to the music-room that autumn morning, she had caught no prophetic gleam of the thing that waited to be known. A few steps across the grass, a moment’s surprise at finding the door ajar, a startled pause upon the threshold. Then, the lights and shadows of that Rembrandtesque interior burning themselves in upon the brain, the limning of that motionless figure in lines of fire against a background of imperishable memories. That he was dead, a touch of the hand betrayed without one moment’s hope. The reason of his death blazoned in gules, with a red rose over the heart. The face set in a smile of infinite sadness. An overturned candle with the wax spilled upon the table, a bowl of flowers broken upon the floor. And in the left hand, held by the stiff fingers, a short chain of gold with a knot of pearls, for a button, like a loop torn from a man’s cloak.