She was
angelically fair, and, young as she was--she could not have been more
than six years old--her dark-blue eyes had a beauty of mind which must
have been remarkable twenty years later. Her pouting mouth was like a
little scarlet serpent, her skin almost transparent, her pale hair fell
waving--not curled with the orthodoxy of childhood--about her tender
bare shoulders. She wore a long white frock, and clasped tightly against
her breast a doll far more gorgeously arrayed than herself. Behind her
were the ruins and the woods of Chillingsworth.
Orth had studied this portrait many times, for the sake of an art which
he understood almost as well as his own; but to-day he saw only the
lovely child. He forgot even the boy in the intensity of this new and
personal absorption.
"Did she live to grow up, I wonder?" he thought. "She should have made a
remarkable, even a famous woman, with those eyes and that brow,
but--could the spirit within that ethereal frame stand the
enlightenments of maturity? Would not that mind--purged, perhaps, in a
long probation from the dross of other existences--flee in disgust from
the commonplace problems of a woman's life? Such perfect beings should
die while they are still perfect.
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