defined in words. Those fine and
mobile features might quite as well indicate bad feelings, and suggest
astuteness and womanly artifice carried to a high pitch of wickedness,
as reveal the refined delicacy of a beautiful soul.

Indeed, the face of a woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the
ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity,
the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there
inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the
intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line,
a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The
appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of
intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of what everyone is
interested in concealing. The old lady's face was like the room she
inhabited; it seemed as difficult to detect whether this squalor covered
vice or the highest virtue, as to decide whether Adelaide's mother was
an old coquette accustomed to weigh, to calculate, to sell everything,
or a loving woman, full of noble feeling and amiable qualities. But at
Schinner's age the first impulse of the heart is to believe in goodness.
And indeed, as he studied Adelaide's noble and almost haughty brow, as
he looked into her eyes full of soul and thought, he breathed, so to
speak, the sweet and modest fragrance of virtue. In the course of
the conversation he seized an opportunity of discussing portraits in
general, to give himself a pretext for examining the frightful _pastel_,
of which the color had flown, and the chalk in many places fallen away.

"You are attached to that picture for the sake of the likeness, no
doubt, mesdames, for the drawing is dreadful?" he said, looking at
Adelaide.

"It was done at Calcutta, in great haste," replied the mother in an
agitated voice.

She gazed at the formless sketch with the deep absorption which memories
of happiness produce when they are roused and fall on the heart like a
beneficent dew to whose refreshing touch we love to yield ourselves up;
but in the expression of the old lady's face there were traces too
of perennial regret. At least, it was thus that the painter chose to
interpret her attitude and countenance, and he presently sat down again
by her side.

"Madame," he said, "in a very short time the colors of that pastel will
have disappeared. The portrait will only survive in your memory. Where
you will still see the face that