ngs had
been broken. This had hitherto seldom given her any concern, and she
would come to dinner without embarrassment all dishevelled by her
sister, the breeze.

"But now she would go to her room and arrange the untidy locks, and when
I would say, with familiar gallantry, which, however, always offended
her:

"'You are as beautiful as a star to-day, Miss Harriet,' a blush would
immediately rise to her cheeks, the blush of a young girl, of a girl of
fifteen.

"Then she would suddenly become quite reserved and cease coming to watch
me paint. I thought, 'This is only a fit of temper; it will blow over.'
But it did not always blow over, and when I spoke to her she would
answer me either with affected indifference or with sullen annoyance.

"She became by turns rude, impatient and nervous. I never saw her now
except at meals, and we spoke but little. I concluded at length that I
must have offended her in some way, and, accordingly, I said to her one
evening:

"'Miss Harriet, why is it that you do not act toward me as formerly?
What have I done to displease you? You are causing me much pain!'

"She replied in a most comical tone of anger:

"'I am just the same with you as formerly. It is not true, not true,'
and she ran upstairs and shut herself up in her room.

"Occasionally she would look at me in a peculiar manner. I have often
said to myself since then that those who are condemned to death must
look thus when they are informed that their last day has come. In her
eye there lurked a species of insanity, an insanity at once mystical and
violent; and even more, a fever, an aggravated longing, impatient and
impotent, for the unattained and unattainable.

"Nay, it seemed to me there was also going on within her a struggle
in which her heart wrestled with an unknown force that she sought to
master, and even, perhaps, something else. But what do I know? What do I
know?

"It was indeed a singular revelation.

"For some time I had commenced to work, as soon as daylight appeared, on
a picture the subject of which was as follows:

"A deep ravine, enclosed, surmounted by two thickets of trees and vines,
extended into the distance and was lost, submerged in that milky vapor,
in that cloud like cotton down that sometimes floats over valleys at
daybreak. And at the extreme end of that heavy, transparent fog one saw,
or, rather, surmised, that a couple of human beings were approaching,
a human couple, a youth and a maid