Catharine’s eyes filled as she looked upon the portrait, and traced back its dim resemblance to the stricken woman whom she had just left, catching like an infant at the sunbeams that came into her chamber-window. The bright, beautiful life, so charming in the picture, had all faded out from the original being. That image on the canvas seemed vital, Elsie the picture. Catharine sunk down to the easy-chair and wept. After a time she went to the pendant of this picture, still oppressed by the strange dread which had followed her ever since she first entered the room. A sweep of her hand carried away the gauze from this portrait also, and that which was behind seemed to chill her into marble. She did not breathe, the color left her lips, and she retreated slowly backward, mute and astonished. It was the portrait of her husband, the man who had abandoned her and her child to disgrace and starvation. Her own husband, for say what they would, deny it as he might, the man yonder, smiling upon her from the crimson of the wall, with his clear gray eyes and chestnut hair, was her husband. All the perjury on earth could not change the truth. It was a terrible shock, this sudden appearance of the man who had wronged her. How frankly those eyes looked down into hers; that smile hovering around the fine mouth! her heart swelled to meet it with a great throb of joy. Those curls—chestnut with a gleam of gold in them—how often had she swept them together in masses with her own hand, and laughed at the air of playful impatience with which he had shaken them back to their place on his white temples. Oh, these memories were too sweet and too painful. The joy of the past was upon it in a bright, rosy cloud, but underneath lay the black thought that he had wronged and left her; even as she looked on the picture, it was there, darting like a flash of lightning through her heart. In this struggle of joy and anguish she sat down, gazing up wistfully at the portrait, and though she knew that it was inanimate, beseeching it to speak one word, and tell her that he was blameless,—that the miserly old woman, his mother, had maligned him, and she would believe his first breath, believe even a look against the whole world, against facts, against truth itself. Thus, half madly, the poor girl, the wife who had no husband, who had been a mother and was childless, pleaded with the dumb, smiling picture.