The rain had ceased, and the moon was out. The dark, massy clouds that
floated between her and the earth were doing their ghostly,
phantasmagoric work. At one moment, clear, white light, like a shroud;
at another moment, darkness, like a pall. An owl, lighting on the spire
of Grace Church in his flight over the city, might have seen the white
edge of the shroud, or the black edge of the pall, advancing in
well-defined lines over the housetops, and the parks, and the two
rivers, swiftly succeeding each other.
It was as if the mighty invisible demons of the night were capriciously
trying the effects of cerements on the sleeping city. It was as if they
were perplexed between the soft beauty of the shroud and the sombre
majesty of the pall. A woman could not have tried on two shawls more
often and more indecisively, before making up her mind to buy.
Little Pet's sleeping room, like every room that faced the south, that
night, was full of strange, spectral effects. The scrolls and the roses
on the cheap yellow curtains that hung in the windows, were changed to
hideous faces of variable size and ugliness.
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