Then appeared on the threshold of the house a white figure, who, drawing back the dark-yellow curtain, which was fastened to rings running on a bronze rod, was framed like a picture in the two pilasters of the entrance--a quite young girl--or was it a young wife? Yes, she must be already a wife, this child of hardly seventeen years, for she is without doubt the mother of the infant which, with her left arm, she nestles to her bosom: only the mother holds a child with such expression in the movements and countenance. Two fingers of the right hand, the inner surface turned outwards, the young mother laid on her lips: "Be quiet!" said she, "our child sleeps." And now the hardly full-ripe form glided down the four stone steps which led from the house into the garden, with the left arm carefully raising the child higher and pressing it closer, with the right gently lifting the hem of her plaited robe as high as her well-formed ankles. It was a spectacle of perfect grace: young and childlike, like Raphael's Madonna, but not humble and at the same time mystically glorious, as the mother of the Christ-child; there was nothing incomprehensible, nothing miraculous, only a noble simplicity and yet royal loftiness in her unconscious dignity and innocence. There floated, as it were, a sweet-sounding music round the figure of this Hebe, every movement being in perfect harmony; wife and yet maiden; entirely human, perfectly at rest and contented in the love of her young husband and of the child at her breast. Lovely, touching, and dignified at the same time, in all the perfect beauty of her figure, her face and her complexion so modest, that in her presence, as before a beautiful statue, every wish was silent. She wore no ornament; her light-brown hair, shining with a golden lustre when the sun kissed it, flowed back in natural waves from the open, well-formed temples, leaving the rather low forehead free, and was fastened at her neck in a loose knot. A milk-white robe of the finest wool, fastened on the left shoulder with a beautifully shaped, but simple silver brooch, hung in folds down to her ankles, showing the pretty red leather sandals; leaving bare the neck and arms, which were still childlike, but rather too long. The robe was fastened at the waist with a wide bronze girdle. Thus she moved silently down the steps, and approached her husband. The long narrow face had that wonderful, almost bluish-white, complexion only possessed by the daughters of Ionia, and which no noon-tide sun of the south can embrown; the eye-brows, in a half-circle, regular as if drawn with compasses, might have given to the countenance a lifeless, statuesque appearance, but under the long, slightly curved, black eye-lashes, the dark-brown gazelle-like eyes, now directed towards her beloved, shone with a life full of feeling.