"Oh! there's no hurry about that, sister; let us sit down and talk a little while first. Allow me to introduce my young friend Théodore de Sérannes, who will pass some time here. I do not need to urge you to make him welcome;--he is his own sufficient recommendation."--I tell you what he said; do not be in a hurry to accuse me of self-conceit.-- The young lady nodded slightly as if in assent, and we talked of other things. As we talked I made a more detailed and more careful examination of her than I had been able to do before. She seemed to be some twenty-three or twenty-four years old and her mourning was most becoming to her; to tell the truth, her manner was not very lugubrious or desolate and I suspect that she had eaten the ashes of her Mausolus in her soup by way of rhubarb.--I do not know whether she had grieved overmuch for her defunct spouse; if she had done it, she hardly showed it now, at all events, and the pretty cambric handkerchief she had in her hand was as perfectly dry as possible. Her eyes were not red, on the contrary they were the clearest and brightest eyes in the world, and you would have sought in vain on her cheeks the furrow through which tears had flowed; indeed, there was nothing there save two little dimples formed by the habit of smiling, and it is fair to say that, for a widow, she displayed her teeth very frequently; and it was certainly not an unpleasant spectacle, for they were small and even. I esteemed her, first of all, for not having felt obliged, just because some poor devil of a husband had died, to blacken her eyes and make her nose red: I was grateful to her also for not affecting any little mournful airs and for talking naturally with her silvery, ringing voice, without dragging out her words and interlarding her sentences with virtuous sighs. It seemed to me in extremely good taste; I set her down at once as a woman of intelligence, which she is in fact. She was well built, with a foot and hand well suited to her figure; her black dress was arranged with all possible coquetry and so daintily that you entirely forgot the lugubriousness of the color, and she might have gone to a ball in that costume without causing any remark. If I ever marry and am left a widow, I shall ask her for a pattern of her dress, for she looks like an angel in it. After some little talk, we went up to the old aunt's room. We found her sitting in a great easy-chair with a sloping back, a little stool under her feet and beside her an old blear-eyed, ugly-looking dog, who raised his black muzzle when we appeared and welcomed us with a far from amiable growl.