So Runs the World Away

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. LOVE, THOU ART BITTER. SWEET IS DEATH TO ME. It was night, the night of Douglas's return home, and Auriel was still as a sepulchre. The last embers had dropped to ashes in the grate. Azalea's linnet had the appearance of having committed self-decapitation, so tightly was its head buried under its wing. Azalea herself was sleeping with that half smile on her lips which only the happy wear while unconscious. The house was steeped in blackest shadow; Auriel wore a lonely aspect in the day, when the sunbeams did their best to revivefaded red and tarnished gold into some likeness of their pristine glory, and swallows paid brief whirring visits to the tenant- less chambers in search of cornices appropriate for nests; but now that the birds and light had alike departed, Auriel seemed absorbed in the deep pensiveness of age and desolation?no light, no sound, no sign of life. A wandering ghost might have glided through chamber after chamber without being vexed by any signs of human existence, unless, indeed, it had paused at the door of the small turret room in which love and beauty held festival. It was the dumbest, darkest hour of the night, when a red tongue of flame made a sudden flash of light through the black shadow of the wainscot at the foot of the old oak staircase. A smouldering beam which had long been threatening mischief behind the panels broke into glaring fury. The first tongue was succeeded by a longer one, which shot forward, andreceded like a beautiful baleful snake; then a volume of smoke began to curl over the pictured faces on the wall. Presently the shadows on the first landing-place were pierced by the growing length of the flame. A scared mouse crept out through a cranny in the wall, and stared with bright eye and alert whisker at this ter...