old
habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the
sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to
set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by
both, between them on either side. After the first happiness of my
meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand in
hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I felt this
strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it too. It has
partially worn away, now that we have fallen back into most of our old
habits, and it will probably disappear before long. But it has
certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have
formed of her, now that we are living together again--for which reason
only I have thought fit to mention it here.

She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed.

Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character. I cannot
absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to be--I can
only say that she is less beautiful to me.

Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and my recollections, would
probably think her improved. There is more colour and more decision
and roundness of outline in her face than there used to be, and her
figure seems more firmly set and more sure and easy in all its
movements than it was in her maiden days. But I miss something when I
look at her--something that once belonged to the happy, innocent life
of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot find in Lady Glyde. There was in
the old times a freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet
ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face, the charm of which it
is not possible to express in words, or, as poor Hartright used often
to say, in painting either. This is gone. I thought I saw the faint
reflection of it for a moment when she turned pale under the agitation
of our sudden meeting on the evening of her return, but it has never
reappeared since. None of her letters had prepared me for a personal
change in her. On the contrary, they had led me to expect that her
marriage had left her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered.
Perhaps I read her letters wrongly in the past, and am now reading her
face wrongly in the present? No matter! Whether her beauty has gained
or whether it has lost in the last six months, the separation either
way has made her own dear self more precious to me than ever, and that
is one good result of her marriage,