Suddenly, she turned toward a tall and narrow chest of drawers that stood at her left hand. She chose a key from her watch-chain, a small gold key that in their childhood had been generally mistaken by her nieces and nephews for one of the bunch of charms they were allowed to play with on "Aunt Alsie's" lap. With it she unlocked a drawer within her reach. Her hand slipped in; she threw a hasty look round her, at the window, the garden. Not a sound of anything but the evening wind, which had just risen, and was making a smart rustling among the shrubs just outside. Her hand, a white, furtive thing, withdrew itself, and in it lay a packet, wrapped in some faded, green velvet. Hurriedly--with yet more pauses to listen and to look--the wrapping was undone; the case within fell open. It contained a miniature portrait of a man--French work, by an excellent pupil of Meissonier. The detail of it was marvellous; so, in Alice Puttenham's view, was the likeness. She remembered when and how it had been commissioned--the artist, and his bare studio in a street on the island, near Notre Dame; the chestnuts in the Luxembourg garden as they walked home; the dust of the falling blossoms, and the children playing in the alleys. And through it all, what passionate, guilty happiness--what dull sense of things irreparable!--what deliberate shutting out of the future! It was as good a likeness as the Abbey picture, only more literal, less "arranged." The Abbey picture, also by a French artist of another school, was younger, and had a fine, romantic, Rene-like charm. "Rene" had been her laughing name for him--her handsome, melancholy, eloquent _poseur!_ Like many of his family, he was proud of his French culture, his French accent, and his knowledge of French books. The tradition that came originally from a French marriage had been kept up from father to son. They were not a learned or an industrious race, but their tongue soon caught the accent of the boulevards--of the Paris they loved and frequented. Her hand lifted the miniature the better to catch the slanting light. As she did so she was freshly struck with a resemblance she had long ceased to be conscious of. Familiarity with a living face, as so often happens, had destroyed for her its likeness--likeness in difference--to a face of the dead. But to-night she saw it--was indeed arrested by it. "And yet Richard was never one tenth as good-looking!" The portrait was set in pearls, and at the foot was an inscription in blue enamel-- "_A ma mie!_" But before she could see it she must with her cold, quick fingers remove the fragment of stained paper that lay upon it like a veil. The half of a page of Moliere--turned down--like that famous page of Shelley's "Sophocles"--and stained with sea water, as that was stained.