For, as the rarest beauty remains imperfect without a touch of strangeness, without something to haunt and to fret the mind, forbidding it to forget, there was a something almost, if not quite, fantastic, in Gabrielle’s loveliness--a touch of irregularity difficult to define--making her beauty more significant through being peculiar, more poignant through being strange. Something indefinite and conjectural tinged her being; the ghost of a vaguely intricate and tragical implication beneath her bright young innocence lurked shadowy and malign. Had her beauty been less perfect this, perhaps, had been less notable. Revealed in a casual attitude, for a moment startling in vividness, now for a moment it was lost, and now stole forth again in the stress of unstudied emotion to accent a passing mood. As one who, looking into her mirror, sees a face there not her own, Margot perceived in her daughter’s face an intricately blended likeness, to banish which into forgetfulness she strove desperately in vain,--the recollection of a wild, sweet, irrevocable hour whose memory was fear. Gabrielle’s beauty made her tremble. It is a perilous privilege for a girl to possess loveliness rising above her station in life; there is a price always to be paid for it, sorrow the common fee; such a heritage of beauty often proves but a legacy of shame,--a beauty built for destruction, a loveliness for scorn; haggard wisdom reaps in tears what innocence sowed with laughter. There was a thought from which Margot shrank as from a draught of poison: Gabrielle degraded and desolate. There was nothing to her more precious than her daughter’s innocence; nothing so important as her earthly happiness; these seemed to Margot even more necessary than her eternal peace. Yet ever a shadow hung over her child, from cradle to grave; her delicate grace and refinement were signatures of dread. Margot’s eyes hunted from side to side as do a deer’s hard pressed by the dogs--can one elude destiny? Where were the lovely and the fair she had known in her own youth? Dead, long ago; the graveyard sand lay cold upon their lips; their passion and their sweetness were forgotten long ago. Margot knew that youth and summer night are made for ecstasy. She knew, too, that in forgotten graveyards are many unmarked graves of hapless beauty. Looking into the mirror where life is stripped of its illusions, and truth stands stark and bare in its unmitigated ugliness, panic terror seized Margot.