bay of the window was a
great chair of Indian wickerwork, and I could have sworn it had but now
been empty. Yet when I looked again a woman sat in it.

Now of a truth I had seen this woman's face but twice; and once it wore
a smile of teasing mockery and once was full of terror; but I thought I
should live long and suffer much before the winsome challenging beauty
of it would let me be as I had been before I had looked upon it.

She knew not that I was awake and slaking the thirst of my eyes upon the
sweetness of her, and so I saw her then as few ever saw her, I think,
with the womanly barriers of defense all down. 'Tis a hard test, and one
that makes a blank at rest of many a face beautiful enough in action;
but though this lady's face was to the full as changeful as any April
sky, it was never less than triumphantly beautiful.

I had said her eyes were blue, but now they were deep wells reflecting
the soft gray of the clouded sky beyond the window-panes. I had made
sure that her lips lent themselves most readily to mocking smiles
scornful of any wit less trenchant than her own; but now these mocking
lips were pensive, and with the rounded cheek and chin gave her the look
of a sweet child wanting to be kissed. I had said her hair was bright in
the sunlight, and so, indeed, it was; but lacking the sun it still held
the dull luster of burnished copper in its masses, and her simple,
care-free dressing of it at a time when _les grandes dames_ were
frizzing and powdering and adding art to art to mar the woman's crown of
glory, gave her yet more the look of a child.

Lastly, I had called her small, and certainly her figure was girlish
beside those grenadier dames of Maria Theresa's court to whom my old
field-marshal had once presented me. But when she rose and went to stand
in the window-bay I marked this; that not any duchess or margravine of
them all had a more queenly bearing, or, with all their stays and
furbelows, could match her supple grace and lissom figure.

What with the blood-lettings and the wound fever, coupled with the
subtle witchery of her presence thus in my sick room, it is little to be
wondered at that a curious madness came over me, or that I forgot for
the moment the loyalty due to my dear lad. Could I have stood before her
and, reading but half consent in the deep-welled eyes, have clipt her in
my arms and laid my lips to hers, I would have run to pay the price, in
earth or heaven or hell, I thought