I have caught it exactly in my picture "Christabel." She
revived and tried to run out of the studio. Her mother and I seized
her, and she then fell down insensible.'
'What occasioned the fit? What had frightened her?'
'That is what I am not quite certain about. When she entered the
studio she fixed her eyes upon a portrait which I had been working
upon; but that must have been merely a coincidence.'
'A portrait!' I cried. And Winifred's scared expression when she
encountered my mother's look of hate in the churchyard came back to
me like a scene witnessed in a flash of lightning. 'The portrait was
my mother's?'
'It was the face of the kind, tender, and noble lady your mother,'
said Wilderspin gently.
I gave a hurried glance at my mother, and saw the pallor of her
face,--but to me the world held now only two realities, Winifred and
Wilderspin; all other people were dreams, obtrusive and irritating
dreams. 'Go on, go on,' I said.
'She recovered,' continued Wilderspin, 'and seemed to have forgotten
all about the portrait, which I had put away.
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