For the first time, that expression struck Arthur painfully; that expression of all not being happy in her life, which it is so bitter a thing to behold in the face of any one near and dear to us; that expression of terrible though almost unconscious loneliness, which is so pitiful, so pathetic, we can scarcely look upon it without tears. Once more let me paint her for you as she kneels there in the fire-light,—let me paint her in the very prime of her womanhood, with the rich warm tints of her hair contrasting against her clear white skin, with her small ears peeping out from below the heavy braids which were wreathed round and round her head, with her face uplifted towards Arthur, her lips parted, her hands clasped, and that pleading look in her eyes—that look which had in it something of a dumb appeal—of an entreaty, which, although the heart could conceive, the tongue refused to utter. Before he could answer her, Arthur had to turn his head away, and fix his eyes on the dancing fire-light. Passing through the world’s long picture gallery, it is oftentimes not the great paintings, not the court ceremonials, not the huge sea pieces, not the representations of battle-fields, not the important portraits and the historical incidents which are photographed on our memories, which are stamped on our mental retina so indelibly, that through the years they are never forgotten. It is not the large finished pictures which we went out to see, which we took, perhaps, much notice of at the time, that stay with us and remain in our memories longest; rather it is the figure of some beggar child, the little glimpse of woodland scenery, the barren bleakness of some desolate moor, the hopeless languor of a dying man’s hand,—these are the trifles which, God knows why, we carry away with us. The scenes of great account at which we have been present, on which we have gazed, in which, perchance, we have been actors, pale and fade away from the canvas of our brains; but so long as memory remains, there are slight gestures and passing expressions which recur to us again and again, and which will recur, till life leave us and the mould be heaped up over the spot where we lie. The tone of a voice, the look in a face, the pressure of a hand, a chance word spoken in love or in anger, a stray sentence in a book—these things stay with us when, to our thinking, weightier matters are forgotten, when the passions and the sorrows, the struggles and the successes of the years departed have come to be in our recollections but as a flower which has bloomed—a leaf which has faded.