But the library’s chief ornament that morning was Muriel—as lovely a blonde as ever grew to the gathered grace and vigor of twenty summers, and with that pervading glimmer of natural elegance and fine courtly breeding in her loveliness, which we express in the word debonair. She was standing very still, rapt in deep musing, with an open volume of Dante held in her left palm, and her white, nervous right hand resting on the page. A lilac dress of some soft tissue, stirred only above the light pulsations of her bosom, flowed in graceful folds, as she stood with one arched foot advanced and partly visible at its margin, and revealed the enchanting harmony of her tall and stately figure. The dress came quite up to the neck, flowering over there in a charming ruffle of lace, above which bloomed her exquisite countenance, virginal and gracious as the morning, as dewy-sweet, as fresh, as spiritually pure. The complexion, fair and clear as a pond-lily, was radiant with perfect health. Color, faint as the dawn, tinted the oval cheeks, and the sweet, curved mouth wore the hue of the wild-brier rose. The large grey eyes were softened with a golden sheen. Amber hair, with a tint of gold in it, parted over the serene and open brow, and rising from the head, as we see it in the Greek statues, rippled down in wavy tresses around the delicate ears, to gather behind in soft, thick loops of antique beauty. Noble and debonair from head to foot, and all imparadised in charm, so on that morning stood Muriel. Who would have dreamed that the reverie in which she was absorbed was too solemn to have grown upon her spirit from the mighty Tuscan page before her? Who could have imagined, gazing upon her calm loveliness, that a great and awful, though silent, struggle had shaken her heart? Yet it was so. The event which can most convulse a woman’s life had come to her. She loved Harrington, and it had dawned upon her that he loved her friend Emily. She had met it bravely. With that revelation her heart had risen to the level of heroic story, and in the spiritual strife which makes life tremble to its centre, she was the victor. She knew that the world lay lonely and disenchanted before her, but she was calm. She knew that life’s fairest hope was unaccomplished, life’s loveliest dream dissolved, but she was strong. She saw afar the dark battalia of the coming years of sadness, and her heart rose to meet them with the pulses of Marathon. It was love’s crowning hour with her—the hour of sacrifice, renunciation, the high soul’s rapture of martyrdom—the hour of bravery and sad, generous joy.