"Wax is so dear." "Wax ?--ah!--pardon me:" and the doctor returned hastily to his work.
But Rose looked up and said, "I wonder Jacintha does not come; it is certainly past the hour;" and she pried into the room as if she expected to see Jacintha on the road.

But she saw in fact very little of anything, for the spacious room was impenetrable to her eye; midway from the candle to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became shapeless and sombre.

The prospect ended sharp and black, as in those out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by a certain great painter, whose Nature comes to a full stop as soon as he has no further commercial need of her, instead of melting by fine expanse and exquisite gradation into genuine distance, as nature does in Claude and in nature.
To reverse the picture, if you stood at the door you looked across forty feet of black, and the little corner seemed on fire, and the fair heads about the candle shone like the St.Cecilias and Madonnas in an antique stained-glass window.
At last the door opened, and another candle fired Jacintha's comely peasant face in the doorway.

She put down her candle outside the door, and started as crow flies for the other light.

After glowing a moment in the doorway she dived into the shadow and emerged into light again close to the table with napkins on her arm.