her compassionately--"Poor Miss Finch." As for me, I can only think of
her by her pretty Christian name. She is "Lucilla" when my memory dwells
on her. Let me call her "Lucilla" here.

When my eyes first rested on her, she was picking off the dead leaves
from her flowers. Her delicate ear detected the sound of my strange
footstep, long before I reached the place at which she was standing. She
lifted her head--and advanced quickly to meet me with a faint flush on
her face, which came and died away again in a moment. I happen to have
visited the picture gallery at Dresden in former years. As she approached
me, nearer and nearer, I was irresistibly reminded of the gem of that
superb collection--the matchless Virgin of Raphael, called "The Madonna
di San Sisto." The fair broad forehead; the peculiar fullness of the
flesh between the eyebrow and the eyelid; the delicate outline of the
lower face; the tender, sensitive lips; the color of the complexion and
the hair--all reflected, with a startling fidelity, the lovely creature
of the Dresden picture. The one fatal point at which the resemblance
ceased, was in the eyes. The divinely-beautiful eyes of Raphael's Virgin
were lost in the living likeness of her that confronted me now. There was
no deformity; there was nothing to recoil from, in my blind Lucilla. The
poor, dim, sightless eyes had a faded, changeless, inexpressive look--and
that was all. Above them, below them, round them, to the very edges of
her eyelids, there was beauty, movement, life. _In_ them--death! A more
charming creature--with that one sad drawback--I never saw. There was no
other personal defect in her. She had the fine height, the well-balanced
figure, and the length of the lower limbs, which make all a woman's
movements graceful of themselves. Her voice was delicious--clear,
cheerful, sympathetic. This, and her smile--which added a charm of its
own to the beauty of her mouth--won my heart, before she had got close
enough to me to put her hand in mine. "Ah, my dear!" I said, in my