“What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?” asked Phœbe, with impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a moment. “It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!” “But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour” said the artist, presenting her with another miniature. “I had just finished it when I heard you at the door.” “This is death!” shuddered Phœbe, turning very pale. “Judge Pyncheon dead!” “Such as there represented,” said Holgrave, “he sits in the next room. The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber, last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah’s room, or Clifford’s; no stir nor footstep about the house. This morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen leaving the house in the midst of yesterday’s storm. A rumor reached me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot describe—an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or consummation—impelled me to make my way into this part of the house, where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,—for, Phœbe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with that man’s fate,—I used the means at my disposal to preserve this pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon’s death.” Even in her agitation, Phœbe could not help remarking the calmness of Holgrave’s demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole awfulness of the Judge’s death, yet had received the fact into his mind without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could almost have been prophesied. “Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?” inquired she with a painful shudder. “It is terrible to be here alone!” “But Clifford!” suggested the artist. “Clifford and Hepzibah! We must consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,—had Clifford flung wide the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon’s death,—it would have been, however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the black stain on Clifford’s character.” “And how,” asked Phœbe, “could any good come from what is so very dreadful?”