d she wore those long loose gauntlets commonly known as
Biarritz gloves. I thought her less tall and less imposing than when I
had seen her in the black velvet which it was her caprice to wear during
the period of her insanity; but she looked more natural, too, and at
first sight one would have merely said that she was a woman of sixty,
who had once been beautiful, and who had not lost the youthful
proportions of her figure. As I observed her more closely in the broad
daylight, on the deck of the steamer, however, I began to see that her
face was marked by innumerable small lines, which followed the shape of
her features like the carefully traced shadows of an engraving; they
crossed her forehead, they made labyrinths of infinitesimal wrinkles
about her eyes, they curved along the high cheek-bones and the somewhat
sunken cheeks, and they surrounded the mouth and made shadings on her
chin. They were not like ordinary wrinkles. They looked as though they
had been drawn with infinite precision and care by the hand of a cunning
workman. To me they betrayed an abnormally nervous temperament, such as
I had not suspected that Madame Patoff possessed, when in the yellow
lamp-light of her apartment her white skin had seemed so smooth and
even. But she was evidently in her right mind, and very quiet, as she
gave me her hand, with the conventional smile which we use to convey the
idea of an equally conventional satisfaction when a stranger is
introduced to us.

John was delighted to see me, and was more like his old self than when I
had last seen him. Mrs. Carvel's gentle temper was not ruffled by the
confusion of landing, and she greeted me as ever, with her sweet smile
and air of sympathetic inquiry. Chrysophrasia held out her hand, a very
forlorn hope of anatomy cased in flabby kid. She also smiled, as one may
fancy that a mosquito smiles in the dark when it settles upon the nose
of some happy sleeper. I am sure that mosquitoes have green eyes,
exactly of the hue of Chrysophrasia's.

"So deliciously barbarous, is it not, Mr. Griggs?" she murmured,
subduing the creaking of her thin voice.

"Dear Mr. Griggs, I am so awfully glad to see you again," said Hermione
with genuine pleasure, as she laid her little hand in mine.

It seemed to me that Hermione was taller and thinner than she had been
in the winter. But there was something womanly in her lovely face, as
she looked at me, which I had not seen before. Her soft blue eyes we