Heaven bless and reward you.

In this portrait you give me the only treasure--the only consolation of my future life!' "So saying, she took a ring from her finger, pressed it, without another word, into my unwilling hand; and, with the same passive dreary look that her face had worn on first entering took up her lamp again, and glided from the room.
"How the next hour, or half hour, went by, I know not--except that I sat before the canvas like one dreaming.

Now and then I added a few touches; but mechanically, and, as it were, in a trance of wonder and dismay.

I had, however, made such good progress before being interrupted, that when my companion woke and told me it would soon be day and I must make haste to be gone, the portrait was even more finished than I had myself hoped to make it in the time.

So I packed up my colors and palette again, and, while I was doing so, observed that he not only drew the cloth once more over the features of the dead, but concealed the likeness behind the altar in the oratory, and even restored the chairs to their old positions against the wall.