I pressed it nervously,--the light blazed forth through the rose-tinted shells which shaded its dazzling clearness, and showed me where I stood, ... within an arm's length of a strange, stiff white creature that sat staring at itself in the silver-framed mirror with wide-open, fixed and glassy eyes! "Sibyl!" I gasped--"My wife ... ! ..." but the words died chokingly in my throat. Was it indeed my wife?--this frozen statue of a woman, watching her own impassive image thus intently? I looked upon her wonderingly,--doubtingly,--as if she were some stranger;--it took me time to recognize her features, and the bronze-gold darkness of her long hair which fell loosely about her in a lavish wealth of rippling waves, ... her left hand hung limply over the arm of the chair in which, like some carven ivory goddess, she sat enthroned,--and tremblingly, slowly, reluctantly, I advanced and took that hand. Cold as ice it lay in my palm much as though it were a waxen model of itself;--it glittered with jewels,--and I studied every ring upon it with a curious, dull pertinacity, like one who seeks a clue to identity. That large turquoise in a diamond setting was a marriage-gift from a duchess,--that opal her father gave her,--the lustrous circle of sapphires and brilliants surmounting her wedding-ring was my gift,--that ruby I seemed to know,----well, well! what a mass of sparkling value wasted on such fragile clay! I peered into her face,--then at the reflection of that face in the mirror,--and again I grew perplexed,--was it, could it be Sibyl after all? Sibyl was beautiful,--_this_ dead thing had a devilish smile on its blue, parted lips, and frenzied horror in its eyes! Suddenly something tense in my brain seemed to snap and give way,--dropping the chill fingers I held, I cried aloud-- "Mavis! Mavis Clare!" In a moment she was with me,--in a glance she comprehended all. Falling on her knees by the dead woman she broke into a passion of weeping. "Oh, poor girl!" she cried--"Oh, poor, unhappy, misguided girl!" I stared at her gloomily. It seemed to me very strange that she should weep for sorrows not her own. There was a fire in my brain,--a confused trouble in my thoughts,--I looked at my dead wife with her fixed gaze and evil smile, sitting rigidly upright, and robed in the mocking sheen of her rose-silk peignoir, showered with old lace, after the costliest of Paris fashions,--then at the living, tender-souled, earnest creature, famed for her genius throughout the world, who knelt on the ground, sobbing over the stiffening hand on which so many rare gems glistened derisively,--and an impulse rose in me stronger than myself, moving me to wild and clamorous speech.