notable character to bring forward; if
past griefs have belonged to her, they have become long since a part of
her character; they are in no way obtrusive. There was, indeed, a
singular cast in one of her eyes, which in moments of excitement--such
few as came over her--impressed the observer very strangely; as if,
while she looked straight upon you and calmly with one eye, the other
were bent upon some scene far remote and out of range, some past episode
it might be of her own life, by over-dwelling upon which she had brought
her organs of sight into this tortured condition. Nine out of ten
observers, however, would never have remarked the peculiarity we have
mentioned, and would only have commented upon Madame Arles--if they had
commented at all--as a quiet person, in whom youth and age seemed just
now to struggle for the mastery, and in whom no trace of French birth
and rearing was apparent, save her speech, and a certain wonderful
aptitude in the arrangement of her dress. The poor lady, moreover, who
showed traces of a vanished beauty, was a sad invalid, and for this
reason, perhaps, had readily accepted the relief afforded by this summer
vacation with two of her city pupils. A violent palpitation of the
heart, from time to time, after sudden or undue exertion or excitement,
shook the poor woman's frail hold upon life. Possibly from this
cause--as is the case with many who are compelled to listen to those
premonitory raps of the grim visitor at the very seat of life--Madame
Arles was a person of strong religious proclivities. Death is knocking
at all hearts, indeed, pretty regularly, and his pace toward triumph is
as formally certain as a pulse beat; but it is, after all, those
disorderly summons of his,--when in a kind of splenetic rage he grips at
our heart-strings, and then lets go,--which keep specially active the
religious sentiment. Madame Arles had been educated in the Romish faith,
and accepted all its tenets with the same unquestioning placidity with
which she enjoyed the sunshine. Without any particular knowledge of the
way in which this faith diverged from other Christian forms, she leaned
upon it (as so many fainting spirits do and will) because the most
available and accessible prop to that religious yearning in her which
craved support. So instinctive and unreasoning a faith was not, however,
such as to provoke any proselytizing zeal or noisy demonstration. Had
it been otherwise, indeed, it could hardly h