killed him?--life seemed a less hard and hopeless thing than before. For
it is love itself and not its responses or results that is the soul of
life and its pleasures.
Two hours passed ere she could again show herself to her father, from
whom she seemed in some new way divided by the new feeling in which he
did not, and could not share. But at last, lest he should seek her, and
finding her, should suspect her thoughts, she descended and sought
him.--For there is a maidenliness in sorrow, that wraps her garments
close around her.--But he was not to be seen; the door of the study was
locked. A shudder passed through her as she thought of what her father,
who lost no opportunity of furthering his all but perfect acquaintance
with the human form and structure, might be about with the figure which
she knew lay dead beneath that velvet pall, but which had arisen to
haunt the hollow caves and cells of her living brain. She rushed away,
and up once more to her silent room, through the darkness which had now
settled down in the house; threw herself again on her bed, and lay
almost paralysed with horror and distress.
But Teufelsbürst was not about anything so frightful as she supposed,
though something frightful enough. I have already implied that
Wolkenlicht was, in form, as fine an embodiment of youthful manhood as
any old Greek republic could have provided one of its sculptors with as
model for an Apollo. It is true, that to the eye of a Greek artist he
would not have been more acceptable in consequence of the regimen he had
been going through for the last few weeks; but the emaciation of
Wolkenlicht’s frame, and the consequent prominence of the muscles,
indicating the pain he had gone through, were peculiarly attractive to
Teufelsbürst.--He was busy preparing to take a cast of the body of his
dead pupil, that it might aid to the perfection of his future labours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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