Had she been reared amid the fatalistic influences of Arabia, she could not have more completely adopted and exemplified the marble motto: "Despair is a free man; Hope is a slave." For her the rosy mist that usually hovers over futurity had been swept rudely aside, the softening glow of the To-Come had been precipitated into a dull, pitiless leaden ever present, at which she never raved nor railed, but inflexibly fought on, expecting neither sunshine nor succour, unappalled and patient as some stony figure of Fate, which chiselled when the race was young, feels the shrouding sands of centuries drifting around and over it, but makes no moan over the buried youth, and watches the approaching night with the same calm, steadfast gaze that looked upon the starry dawn, and the golden glory of the noon. The cautious repression which necessity had long ago rendered habitual had crystallized into a mask, which even when alone she rarely laid aside for an instant. In actual life, and among strong positive natures, the deepest feelings find no vent in the effervescence of passionate verbal outbreaks, and outside the charmed precincts of the tragic stage, the world would not tolerate the raving Hamlets and Othellos, the Macbeths and Medeas, that scowl and storm and anathematize so successfully in the magic glow of the footlights. To-day, as Madame Odille Orme leaned back in her luxuriously cushioned chair, she seemed quite as a statue, save the restless movements of her slender fingers, which twined and intertwined continually; while the concentrated gaze of the imperial eyes never stirred from the open window, whence she saw--not Parisian monuments of civic glory and martial splendour--only her own past, her haunting skull and cross-bones of the Bygone. Her violet-coloured dressing-gown was unbuttoned at the throat, exposing the graceful turn of the neck, and the proud poise of the perfectly modelled head, from which the shining hair fell like Danae's shower, framing the face and figure on a back ground as golden as that of some carefully preserved Byzantine picture. At last the heavily fringed lids quivered, drooped, the magnificent eyes closed as if to shut out some vision too torturing even for their brave penetrating gaze, and in her rigid whiteness she seemed some unearthly creature, who had done for ever with feverish life and the frail toys of time. Raising her arms above her head, she rested her clasped hands upon her brow, and in a low, strangely quiet tone her words dropped like icicles. "It was a groundless fear, that when the long-sought opportunity came my weak womanish nature would betray me, and I should fail, break down utterly under the crushing weight of tender memories, sacred associations. What are they?