"I will show you what I was like at nineteen," and she got up and
turned to a desk, from which she took a little ivory miniature.
"That," she said, "was given to Mr. Hexton when we were engaged. I
thought he would have locked it up, but he used to leave it about, and
one day I found it in the dressing-table drawer, with some brushes and
combs, and two or three letters of mine. I withdrew it, and burnt the
letters. He never asked for it, and here it is."

The head was small and set upon the neck like a flower, but not bending
pensively. It was rather thrown back with a kind of firmness, and with
a peculiarly open air, as if it had nothing to conceal and wished the
world to conceal nothing. The body was shown down to the waist, and
was slim and graceful. But what was most noteworthy about the picture
was its solemn seriousness, a seriousness capable of infinite
affection, and of infinite abandonment, not sensuous abandonment--
everything was too severe, too much controlled by the arch of the top
of the head for that--but of an abandonment to spiritual aims."

Miss Arbour continued: "Mr. Hexton after a while gave me to understand
that he was my admirer, and before six months of acquaintanceship had
passed my mother told me that he had requested formally that he might
be considered as my suitor. She put no pressure upon me, nor did my
father, excepting that they said that if I would accept Mr. Hexton they
would be content, as they knew him to be a very well-conducted young
man, a member of the church, and prosperous in his business. My first,
and for a time my sovereign, impulse was to reject him, because I
thought him mean, and because I felt he lacked sympathy with me.

"Unhappily I did not trust that impulse. I looked for something more
authoritative, but I was mistaken, for the voice of God, to me at