with all that makes life bright and precious,
and were fronting with calm smile and quiet pulses a grim and
desperate conflict, which she well knew could have an end only in
the peace of the pall, that long truce, whose signal is the knell and
the requiem.

Had she been reared amid the fatalistic influences of Arabia, she
could not have more completely adopted and exemplified the marble
motto: "Despair is a free man; Hope is a slave." For her the rosy
mist that usually hovers over futurity had been swept rudely aside,
the softening glow of the To-Come had been precipitated into a dull,
pitiless leaden ever present, at which she never raved nor railed,
but inflexibly fought on, expecting neither sunshine nor succour,
unappalled and patient as some stony figure of Fate, which chiselled
when the race was young, feels the shrouding sands of centuries
drifting around and over it, but makes no moan over the buried youth,
and watches the approaching night with the same calm, steadfast gaze
that looked upon the starry dawn, and the golden glory of the noon.

The cautious repression which necessity had long ago rendered
habitual had crystallized into a mask, which even when alone she
rarely laid aside for an instant. In actual life, and among strong
positive natures, the deepest feelings find no vent in the
effervescence of passionate verbal outbreaks, and outside the charmed
precincts of the tragic stage, the world would not tolerate the
raving Hamlets and Othellos, the Macbeths and Medeas, that scowl and
storm and anathematize so successfully in the magic glow of the
footlights.

To-day, as Madame Odille Orme leaned back in her luxuriously
cushioned chair, she seemed quite as a statue, save the restless
movements of her slender fingers, which twined and intertwined
continually; while the concentrated gaze of the imperial eyes never
stirred from the open window, whence she saw--not Parisian monuments
of civic glory and martial splendour--only her own past, her haunting
skull and cross-bones of the Bygone. Her violet-coloured
dressing-gown was unbuttoned at the throat, exposing the graceful
turn of the neck, and the proud poise of the perfectly modelled head,
from which the shining hair fell like Danae's shower, framing the face
and figure on a back ground as golden as that of some carefully
preserved Byzantine picture.

At last the heavily fringed lids quivered, drooped, the magnificent
eyes closed as if to shut out some