What the light showed her was a slim form in a white dressing-gown, that fell loosely about it; a rounded arm up-stretched; a head, still crowned with its jessamine wreath, from which the bright hair fell heavily over shoulders and bosom; eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud challenge at what they saw; two lips, ‘indifferent red’ just open to let the quick breath come through--all thrown into the wildest chiaroscuro by the wavering candle flame. Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her arm dropped. She put down the light. ‘I _am_ handsome,’ she said to herself, her mouth quivering childishly. ‘I am. I may say it to myself.’ Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. Her room, on the opposite side of the house from Langham’s, looked over the cornfields and the distance. The stubbles gleamed faintly; the dark woods, the clouds teased by the rising wind, sent a moaning voice to greet her. ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ she cried to the darkness, clenching her cold little hand. Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her head in the bed-clothes. She was crying--angry stifled tears which had the hot impatience of youth in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was not the man she had dreamed of--the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_ had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it. She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace--to indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood trouble; will none of it; murmurs again wildly,-- ‘I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded--ungrateful--unkind!’ In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, inthrall her inmost soul. The charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike. That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed, struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing, there, trying to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London visit, the ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering, many-colored lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of artistic power. In vain. The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise; And the colors have all passed away from her eyes. She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth, of enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live? Ah! why should it hurt so--this long-awaited birth of the soul? BOOK III. THE SQUIRE. CHAPTER XIX.