BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 147
The face took fresh possession of him as he worked; and when presently he began to think again of Dolly, and to picture in his mind the scene she had forecast of a floating gondola on the Grand Canal, with only they two and the gondolier in the moonlight, with music rising and falling in the sweet Spring air, that face had gradually as it were eclipsed Dolly's cheerful, love-inviting features, and it was at the feet of the strange woman he was sitting, and the music changed to the appealing and the defiant strains of the mountain scene, with the loving maiden fresh from the innocent village and the dying mother, and Philip again looked round the studio as if someone had come in without opening the door.
Then with a sigh he laid down his brushes, and staggered, rather than walked, into an inner room, that was fitted up as part bedroom, part sitting-room and dressing-room, flung himself down before a crucifix, and prayed with all his heart for guidance, for aid, and for comfort.
When he rose from his knees he returned to the studio and paced to and fro in a steady, steadfast manner, occasionally running his fingers through his hair, but never pausing until after nearly an hour of this physical and mental exercise for he was thinking and revolving all manner of ideas about himself, the picture, Dolly, and the woman of the opera box he drew a couch before the stove, lay down, and, tired in mind and body, drifted into that kind of sleep which Dickens speaks of as stealing upon us sometimes, and while it holds the body prisoner does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, but enables it to ramble as it pleases.
Philip, resting with a sense of the happiness that comes with the redressing of every physical want, wandered off into pleasanter dreams than those which had hitherto filled his waking mind. Once more it was Dolly at whose feet he reclined on the waters of that city of the ocean he had
