I did not merely see Miriam enjoying whatever I had once enjoyed; I saw her loved as I had never been loved, possessed of a thousand things which had never been mine to lose. Miriam was a woman, an intellectual, educated woman; she could do more than listen to Cornelius, she could converse with him; she did do so, and constantly she showed me the immense superiority which her knowledge and her years gave her over a mere child like me. She had also become converted to Art, and if not so fervent a disciple as I had been, she was certainly a far more discriminating critic. Her sense of the beautiful was keen and peculiar. She seldom admired it under its daily external aspects, but she could detect it where it seemed invisible to others, and was by them unsought for. She never agreed with Cornelius about what he considered the merits of his pictures; but then, by showing him other real merits of which he had remained unconscious, she charmed more than she ever provoked him. With his fair mistress to sit to him, to look at and talk to--what could Cornelius want with me? It was natural that involuntary and unconscious carelessness should creep into his kindest words and caresses; that, exclusively absorbed in Miriam, he should often forget my presence; that his look, perpetually fastened on her, should seldom fall on me; that every word he uttered should be directed to her: it was natural; but to see, feel, know this, not once in a time, but daily, not for an hour in the day, but all day long, was a torment that acted on me as a slow fever. But it was not all. Though Cornelius had been, was still, very fond of me, he had never of course been in love with me. He was in love with Miriam, and if he had enough self-control and self-respect not to show more of the feeling than it was becoming for a child like me to see, he loved too ardently not to be for ever betraying himself to jealous and watchful eyes like mine. His look rested on her with a tenderness and a passion, his voice addressed her in lingering accents, of which he was himself unconscious. His very tones changed in uttering her name, just as the meaning of his face became different when he looked at her. If I had known the frail and fleeting nature of human feelings, I might not have trusted these first signs of a first passion; but all I knew of love was what the fairy tales had told me, and in them I had never read but of loves that had no ending, and were not less ardent than enduring. That Cornelius might one day be less absorbed in Miriam, less oblivious of me, was a thought I never knew nor cherished. The future, when I could forget the present enough to think of the future, had but one image--Cornelius eternally loving Miriam, eternally forgetting me. But even this was not all.