living figure--a very pretty and lady-like one. There was the very
bonnet with which I had fallen in love. The lady stood with her back
toward me. I could not tell whether the envious veil was raised; she was
reading a letter.

I stood for a minute in fixed attention, gazing upon her, in vague hope
that she might turn about and give me an opportunity of seeing her
features. She did not; but with a step or two she placed herself before
a little cabriole-table, which stood against the wall, from which rose
a tall mirror in a tarnished frame.

I might, indeed, have mistaken it for a picture; for it now reflected a
half-length portrait of a singularly beautiful woman.

She was looking down upon a letter which she held in her slender
fingers, and in which she seemed absorbed.

The face was oval, melancholy, sweet. It had in it, nevertheless, a
faint and undefinably sensual quality also. Nothing could exceed the
delicacy of its features, or the brilliancy of its tints. The eyes,
indeed, were lowered, so that I could not see their color; nothing but
their long lashes and delicate eyebrows. She continued reading. She must
have been deeply interested; I never saw a living form so motionless--I
gazed on a tinted statue.

Being at that time blessed with long and keen vision, I saw this
beautiful face with perfect distinctness. I saw even the blue veins that
traced their wanderings on the whiteness of her full throat.

I ought to have retreated as noiselessly as I came in, before my