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Christabel!  It was Winifred sitting there upright in bed, confronted by a female figure—­a tall lady, who with bowed head was undressing herself beneath a lamp suspended from the ceiling.  Christabel!  It was Winifred gazing at this figure—­gazing as though fascinated; her dark hair falling and tumbling down her neck, till it was at last partly lost between her shining bosom and her nightdress.  Yes, and in her blue eyes there was the same concentration of light, there was the same uprolling of the lips, there was the same dreadful gleaming of the teeth, the same swollen veins about the throat that I had seen in Wales.  No wonder that at first I could see only the face and figure of Winifred.  My consciousness had again dwindled to a single point.  In a few seconds, however, I perceived that the scene was an antique oak-panelled chamber, corniced with large and curiously-carven figures, upon which played the warm light from a silver lamp suspended from the middle of the ceiling by a twofold silver chain fastened to the feet of an angel, quaintly carved in the dark wood of the ceiling.  It was beneath this lamp that stood the majestic figure of the beautiful stranger, the Lady Geraldine.  As she bent her head to look at her bosom, which she was about fully to uncover, the lamp-light gleaming among the gems and flashing in her hair and down her loosened white silken robe to her naked feet, shining, blue-veined and half-hidden in the green rushes that covered the floor, she seemed to be herself the source from which the lurid light was shed about the room.  But her eyes were brighter than all.  They were more dreadful by far to look at than Winifred’s own—­they were rolling wildly as if in an agony of hate, while she was drawing in her breath till that marble throat of hers seemed choking.  It was not upon her eyes, however, that Winifred’s were fixed:  it was upon the lady’s bosom, for out from beneath the partially-loosened robes that covered that bosom a tiny fork of flame was flickering like a serpent’s tongue ruddy from the fires of a cruel and monstrous hate within.

This sight was dreadful enough; but it was not the terror on Winifred’s face that now sent me reeling against Sleaford, who with my mother had followed me into the smaller room.  Whose figure was that, and whose was the face which at first I had half-recognised in the Lady Geraldine?  My mother’s!

In painting this subject Wilderspin had, without knowing it, worked with too strong a reminiscence of my mother’s portrait, unconscious that he was but giving expression to the awful irony of Heaven.

I turned round.  Wilderspin was supporting with difficulty my mother’s dead weight.  For the first time (as I think) in her life, she whom, until I came to know Sinfi Lovell, I had believed to be the strongest, proudest, bravest woman living, had fainted.

‘Dear me!’ said Wilderspin, ’I had no idea that Christabel’s terror was so strongly rendered,—­no idea!  Art should never produce an effect like this.  Romantic art knows nothing of a mere sensational illusion.  Dear me!—­I must soften it at once.’