d arms and asked herself what her cousin did to make his
hands so softly white, his nails so delicately curved. She put on
new stockings and her prettiest shoes. She laced her corset straight,
without skipping a single eyelet. And then, wishing for the first time
in her life to appear to advantage, she felt the joy of having a new
gown, well made, which rendered her attractive.

As she finished her toilet the clock of the parish church struck the
hour; to her astonishment, it was only seven. The desire of having
plenty of time for dressing carefully had led her to get up too early.
Ignorant of the art of retouching every curl and studying every effect,
Eugenie simply crossed her arms, sat down by the window, and looked
at the court-yard, the narrow garden, and the high terraced walls that
over-topped it: a dismal, hedged-in prospect, yet not wholly devoid
of those mysterious beauties which belong to solitary or uncultivated
nature. Near the kitchen was a well surrounded by a curb, with a
pulley fastened to a bent iron rod clasped by a vine whose leaves
were withered, reddened, and shrivelled by the season. From thence the
tortuous shoots straggled to the wall, clutched it, and ran the whole
length of the house, ending near the wood-pile, where the logs were
ranged with as much precision as the books in a library. The pavement
of the court-yard showed the black stains produced in time by lichens,
herbage, and the absence of all movement or friction. The thick walls
wore a coating of green moss streaked with waving brown lines, and the
eight stone steps at the bottom of the court-yard which led up to the
gate of the garden were disjointed and hidden beneath tall plants, like
the tomb of a knight buried by his widow in the days of the Crusades.
Above a foundation of moss-grown, crumbling stones was a trellis of
rotten wood, half fallen from decay; over them clambered and intertwined
at will a mass of clustering creepers. On each side of the latticed gate
stretched the crooked arms of two stunted apple-trees. Three parallel
walks, gravelled and separated from each other by square beds, where
the earth was held in by box-borders, made the garden, which terminated,
beneath a terrace of the old walls, in a group of lindens. At the
farther end were raspberry-bushes; at the other, near the house, an
immense walnut-tree drooped its branches almost into the window of the
miser's sanctum.

A clear day and the beautiful autumnal su