n common to the banks of the
Loire was beginning to melt the hoar-frost which the night had laid on
these picturesque objects, on the walls, and on the plants which swathed
the court-yard. Eugenie found a novel charm in the aspect of things
lately so insignificant to her. A thousand confused thoughts came to
birth in her mind and grew there, as the sunbeams grew without along the
wall. She felt that impulse of delight, vague, inexplicable, which wraps
the moral being as a cloud wraps the physical body. Her thoughts were
all in keeping with the details of this strange landscape, and the
harmonies of her heart blended with the harmonies of nature. When the
sun reached an angle of the wall where the "Venus-hair" of southern
climes drooped its thick leaves, lit with the changing colors of a
pigeon's breast, celestial rays of hope illumined the future to her
eyes, and thenceforth she loved to gaze upon that piece of wall, on its
pale flowers, its blue harebells, its wilting herbage, with which she
mingled memories as tender as those of childhood. The noise made by each
leaf as it fell from its twig in the void of that echoing court gave
answer to the secret questionings of the young girl, who could have
stayed there the livelong day without perceiving the flight of time.
Then came tumultuous heavings of the soul. She rose often, went to her
glass, and looked at herself, as an author in good faith looks at his
work to criticise it and blame it in his own mind.

"I am not beautiful enough for him!" Such was Eugenie's thought,--a
humble thought, fertile in suffering. The poor girl did not do herself
justice; but modesty, or rather fear, is among the first of love's
virtues. Eugenie belonged to the type of children with sturdy
constitutions, such as we see among the lesser bourgeoisie, whose
beauties always seem a little vulgar; and yet, though she resembled
the Venus of Milo, the lines of her figure were ennobled by the softer
Christian sentiment which purifies womanhood and gives it a distinction
unknown to the sculptors of antiquity. She had an enormous head, with
the masculine yet delicate forehead of the Jupiter of Phidias, and gray
eyes, to which her chaste life, penetrating fully into them, carried a
flood of light. The features of her round face, formerly fresh and rosy,
were at one time swollen by the small-pox, which destroyed the velvet
texture of the skin, though it kindly left no other traces, and her
cheek was stil