ate pictures, chiefly in
water-colour. One of these productions stood on a drawing-room easel
before which, at the moment we begin to be concerned with her, the young
girl I have mentioned had placed herself. She was looking at the picture
in silence.

Silence--absolute silence--had not fallen upon her companions; but their
talk had an appearance of embarrassed continuity. The two good sisters
had not settled themselves in their respective chairs; their attitude
expressed a final reserve and their faces showed the glaze of
prudence. They were plain, ample, mild-featured women, with a kind of
business-like modesty to which the impersonal aspect of their stiffened
linen and of the serge that draped them as if nailed on frames gave an
advantage. One of them, a person of a certain age, in spectacles, with a
fresh complexion and a full cheek, had a more discriminating manner
than her colleague, as well as the responsibility of their errand, which
apparently related to the young girl. This object of interest wore her
hat--an ornament of extreme simplicity and not at variance with her
plain muslin gown, too short for her years, though it must already
have been "let out." The gentleman who might have been supposed to be
entertaining the two nuns was perhaps conscious of the difficulties of
his function, it being in its way as arduous to converse with the very
meek as with the very mighty. At the same time he was clearly much
occupied with their quiet charge, and while she turned her back to
him his eyes rested gravely on her slim, small figure. He was a man of
forty, with a high but well-shaped head, on which the hair, still dense,
but prematurely grizzled, had been cropped close. He had a fine, narrow,
extremely modelled and composed face, of which the only fault was just
this effect of its running a trifle too much to points; an appearance to
which the shape of the beard contributed not a little. This beard, cut
in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century and surmounted
by a fair moustache, of which the ends had a romantic upward flourish,
gave its wearer a foreign, traditionary look and suggested that he was a
gentleman who studied style. His conscious, curious eyes, however, eyes
at once vague and penetrating, intelligent and hard, expressive of
the observer as well as of the dreamer, would have assured you that
he studied it only within well-chosen limits, and that in so far as he
sought it he found it. You wou