forth by the young leaf-buds in the
spring?--all in obedience to the immutable Scheme; all to some end which
God alone knows. Yet, surely, all things proceed to Him, or rather, to
Him all things return.

Such thoughts of religion, the natural thoughts of age, floated up
now and again on the current of Mme. d'Aiglemont's thoughts; they were
always dimly present in her mind, but sometimes they shone out clearly,
sometimes they were carried under, like flowers tossed on the vexed
surface of a stormy sea.

She sat on a garden-seat, tired with walking, exhausted with much
thinking--with the long thoughts in which a whole lifetime rises up
before the mind, and is spread out like a scroll before the eyes of
those who feel that Death is near.

If a poet had chanced to pass along the boulevard, he would have found
an interesting picture in the face of this woman, grown old before her
time. As she sat under the dotted shadow of the acacia, the shadow the
acacia casts at noon, a thousand thoughts were written for all the world
to see on her features, pale and cold even in the hot, bright sunlight.
There was something sadder than the sense of waning life in that
expressive face, some trouble that went deeper than the weariness of
experience. It was a face of a type that fixes you in a moment among a
host of characterless faces that fail to draw a second glance, a face
to set you thinking. Among a thousand pictures in a gallery, you are
strongly impressed by the sublime anguish on the face of some Madonna
of Murillo's; by some _Beatrice Cenci_ in which Guido's art portrays the
most touching innocence against a background of horror and crime; by the
awe and majesty that should encircle a king, caught once and for ever
by Velasquez in the sombre face of a Philip II., and so is it with some
living human faces; they are tyrannous pictures which speak to you,
submit you to searching scrutiny, and give response to your inmost
thoughts, nay, there are faces that set forth a whole drama, and Mme.
d'Aiglemont's stony face was one of these awful tragedies, one of such
faces as Dante Alighieri saw by thousands in his vision.

For the little season that a woman's beauty is in flower it serves her
admirably well in the dissimulation to which her natural weakness and
our social laws condemn her. A young face and rich color, and eyes that
glow with light, a gracious maze of such subtle, manifold lines and
curves, flawless and perfectly traced