. To have been anticipated in
a manner so unusual gave back in romantic suggestiveness what at first
sight it seemed to steal from one's personal originality. Only at first
sight--for, if like Beatrice, you were the possessor of a face so
uncommon in type that your lover might, with little fear of disproof,
declare, at all events in England, that there was none other like it,
you might grow superstitious as you looked at an anticipation so
creepily identical, and conceive strange fancies of re-incarnation. What
if this had been you in some former existence! Or at all events, if
there is any truth in those who tell us that in the mould and lines of
our faces and hands--yes! and in every secret marking of our bodies--our
fates are written as in a parchment; would it not be reasonable to
surmise, perhaps to fear, that the writing should mean the same on one
face as on the other, and the fates as well as the faces prove
identical?

Beatrice gave the mask back to Antony, with a little shiver.

"It is very wonderful, very strange, but she makes me frightened. What
was the story the man told you, Antony?"

"No doubt it was all nonsense," Antony replied, "but he said that it was
the death-mask of an unknown girl found drowned in the Seine."

"Drowned in the Seine!" exclaimed Beatrice, growing almost as white as
the image.

"Yes! and he said too that the story went that the sculptor who moulded
it had fallen so in love with the dead girl, that he had gone mad and
drowned himself in the Seine also."

"Can it be true, Antony?"

"I hope so, for it is so beautiful,--and nothing is really beautiful
till it has come true."

"But the pain, the pity of it--Antony."

"That is a part of the beauty, surely--the very essence of its beauty--"

"Beauty! beauty! O Antony, that is always your cry. I can only think of
the terror, the human anguish. Poor girl--" and she turned again to the
image as it lay upon the table,--"see how the hair lies moulded round
her ears with the water, and how her eyelashes stick to her cheek--Poor
girl."

"But see how happy she looks. Why should we pity one who can smile like
that? See how peaceful she looks;" and with a sudden whim, Antony took
the image and set it lying back on a soft cushion in a corner of the
couch, at the same time throwing round its neck his black cloak, which
he had cast off as he came in.

The image nestled into the cushion as though it had veritably been a
living woman wear