Slowly and by scarcely perceptible degrees, Agatha seemed to learn the full value of the prize which her friend had drawn in the lottery of life. His fine talents seemed to dawn upon her with daily increasing vividness, his amateur sketches became more and more characterized by genius, his musical taste developed itself surprisingly, and, ere many weeks had elapsed, Alice had the satisfaction of repeating to her husband many a heart-warm compliment breathed into the ear of the happy wife by cousin Agatha in her hours of confidential communing with her friend. Nor was Mr. Wentworth slower in discovering the latent charms of his guest. Restored to her former health, and associating as the guest of Mrs. Wentworth, in a pleasant circle of society, cousin Agatha threw aside the weeds of widowhood, and appeared in all the attractive coquetry of tasteful and becoming dress. Her luxuriant tresses were once more allowed to shadow her low feminine brow, and fall upon her graceful neck, or, if bound up in conformity with fashion, the very restraint was studiously arranged in such a manner as to display their rich redundancy. Her grey eyes sometimes seemed actually flashing with light, and again were filled with the soft liquid lustre of intense sensibility; and then her smile, displaying her brilliant teeth and lighting up her whole face, had the effect of a sudden sunbeam upon a darkened landscape. The charm of Agatha’s face was its vivid and varied expression; the grace of her person was the effect of long and carefully studied art. Not a look, not a gesture, not even a movement of her fringed eyelids, but was the result of frequent practice. There was a perfection of grace in her attitudes that seemed like Nature’s self. Her head always assumed a pretty position, her curls always seemed to drop in their proper place, her drapery always fell in becoming folds, and no one observed that she was particular in avoiding cross lights, especially careful not to face a broad glare of sunshine, and remarkably fond of placing herself at the arm of a sofa, so as to obtain a fine back ground for the exhibition of her attitudes. Harry Wentworth wondered how he could ever have thought her ugly. And then her manners:—what could be more gentle, more feminine, more fascinating than the tenderness of her tones and the sweetness of her deportment? She seemed to look upon gentlemen as if she felt all a woman’s helplessness, and was willing to consider man as a “_chevalier sans peur et sans reproche_,” born to be her natural protector. There was something so pleading in the soft eyes which she lifted to the face of the sterner sex, that few could resist their charm, and actually Harry Wentworth was not one of those few.