People pleaded hard to be allowed to introduce such and such a friend who was dying to make Mrs. Champernowne's acquaintance, but she was seldom charitable enough to say with Rogers, "Let him live." "Come to see me whenever you like," she said; "but don't bring me any strangers; I detest strangers. The only people I care to know are people I can know before I see them. I read a book or see a picture, or hear a sonata on the violin; and I know in a moment whether I shall like the man or woman who writes, or paints, or plays. I knew by the turn of his Iphigenia's head that I should like Mr. Glendower the sculptor, and now he is one of my best friends. And there is Mr. Crawford," added the widow, smiling sweetly as she turned to the painter; "I knew him intimately from the moment in which I stood riveted before that wonderful Aspasia." It was at the call of this enchantress that Mr. Crawford had left his painting-room in the bleak February afternoon. He rang the bell, which tinkled with a subdued sound in the distance, for the genius of noise was banished from the Hermitage. Once within those sheltering walls, the visitor recognised an atmosphere which had nothing in common with the vulgar air without. A solemn hush reigned as in a cathedral. No shrieking birds, no yelping lapdogs broke the serene stillness. A man admitted Mr. Crawford into a long glazed corridor, where there were hothouse flowers, the frailest of exotics, whose waxen petals glimmered whitely amidst foliage of dark shining green; and at the extreme end two marble figures seemed to keep guard over a pair of dark-green-velvet doors; which divided the corridor from the inner sanctuary. One of the statues was the Genius of Night, with starry veil and extinguished torch; the other, a Silence, with lifted finger pressed upon closed lips. The subdued tone of the vestibule, the dark foliage and colourless petals of the exotics, the chill whiteness of marble against a background of sombre green, possessed a harmony of their own; and the visitor who entered the Hermitage for the first time felt, before he reached the end of the vestibule, that he was in no common abode. For the painter, acutely alive to the sense of external beauty, the surroundings of Mrs. Champernowne had an irresistible intoxication. "Why do I come here?" he asked himself, as he followed the servant to the end of the vestibule. "There is an odour in the very atmosphere that stupifies and bewilders me. Take away a wall here and there, and open barbaric colonnades to the glare of an Eastern sun, and I can fancy Samson coming to visit Delilah in this house. I have half a mind to leave my card, and go away without seeing her."