As I passed and repassed the double mirror, my reflected figure seemed an apparition gliding by my side, I paused and stood before one of them, and I thought of the time when, first awakened to the consciousness of personal influence, I gazed on my own image. Some writer has said, "that every woman is beautiful when she loves." There certainly is a light, coming up from the enkindled heart, bright as the solar ray, yet pure and soft as moonlight, which throws an illusion over the plainest features and makes them for the moment charming. I saw the flower-girl of the library in the mirror, and then I knew that the artist had intended her as the idealization of Love's image. And then I remembered the morning when we sat together in the library, and he took the roses from my basket and scattered the leaves at my feet. CHAPTER XXVI. A thundering rap at the door startled my meditations. I knew there was but one pair of knuckles in the house capable of beating such a tattoo, and I recoiled from admitting such a boisterous guest. "Gabriella, Gabriella!" rung a voice through the passage. "Are you asleep? Are you dead? Open the door, pray, or I shall kill myself squeezing in through the key-hole." With a deep sigh of vexation, I opened the door, and she sprang in with the momentum of a ball hurled by a bat. "My dear creature!" she exclaimed, catching me round the waist and turning me to the light, "what _have_ you been doing? where _have_ you been staying? Ill!--tired!--it is all a sham. He need not try to impose on me such a story as that. I never saw you look so brilliantly well. Your cheeks and lips are red like the damask rose, and your eyes,--I never saw such eyes before. Come here and look in the glass. Ill!--ha, ha!" "I have been ill," I answered, shrinking from her reckless hand, "and I was very tired; I feel better now." "Yes, I should think you did. You rested long enough by the way, Heaven knows; we saw you climbing the hill at sunset, and the lamps were lighted before you came in. I was going after you, but Mrs. Linwood would not let me. Ah! you have animated the statue, thou modern Pygmaliona. You have turned back into flesh this enchanted man of stone. Tell it in Gath, publish it in Askelon; but the daughters of fashion will mourn, the tribes of the neglected will envy." "I cannot match you in brilliant speeches, Miss Melville." "Call me Miss Melville again, if you dare. Call me Madge, or Meg; but as sure as you mount the stilts of ceremony, I will whisk you off at the risk of breaking your neck. Hark! there is the supper bell. Come, just as you are. You never looked so charming. That wild flow of the hair is perfectly bewitching. I don't wonder Mr. Invincible has grounded his weapons, not I. If I were a young man,--ha, ha!" "I sometimes fear you are," I cried. At this remark she burst into such a wild fit of laughter, I thought she never would cease. It drowned the ringing of the bell, and still kept gushing over afresh.