. Had I been actually engaged, I might, perhaps, have
hesitated to fulfill the duties that my poor mother had a right to
demand of me. For you must know that my father died very suddenly, and
then it appeared that the mother of the heartless girl--who also passed
for a cold character--concealed a much more passionate love under an
austere exterior than most old women are accustomed to retain beyond
their silver-wedding. The death of her old husband first threw my
mother into a serious illness, and then into a half-wandering state, in
which she lived on for many years, to her torture and to mine!"

She paused; then she suddenly stood up and stepped to the artist's side
behind the easel.

"Pardon me, dear," she said, "but I think you ought to stop. Every
additional stroke of the brush that tones down or paints away anything
will make it look less like me. Look at me more carefully--am I really
that blooming creature that beams upon the world from out that canvas?
Twelve years of denial, loneliness, and living entombment, have they
left no trace upon my face? That is the way I might have looked,
perhaps, had I known happiness. They say, you know, happiness preserves
youth. But I--I am horribly old! And yet, in reality, I have not begun
to live!"

She turned hastily away and walked to the window.

Angelica laid aside her palette, went softly up to her, and threw her
arm about her agitated friend.

"Julie," said she, "when _you_ speak that way--you, who by a mere smile
could tame wild animals and drive tame men mad!"

She turned to her comforter, and the tears stood in her eyes.

"Oh, my dear," she said, "what nonsense you are talking! How often I
have envied a young peasant girl, with an ugly, stupid face, who
brought us eggs and milk, simply because she could come and go as she
liked, and moved among living beings! But I--can you conceive what it
means to have constantly at your side a being whom you cannot but love,
and yet whom you are forced to look upon as one dead, as a living
ghost; to hear the voice that once caressed you utter senseless
sounds, to see the eye that once beamed on you so warmly, strange and
dimmed--the eye, the voice, of your own mother? And this, year in and
year out--and this half-dead being only waked into anxiety and
agitation whenever I made an attempt to leave her. For, truly, when I
had borne it a year, I thought I was being crushed by it, without
feeling the satisfaction that the sacr