Not many streets distant, another pair of eyes looked into the brightening east, but saw no gladness there. Margaret Hamilton remembered that it was her twenty-fifth birthday, and that she had cried herself to sleep the night before, thinking of it. But she would not remember former birthdays, celebrated by father, mother, and sisters, before they had died, one after one, and left her alone and aghast before the world. This, and some other memories still more recent, she put out of sight; and, since they would not stay without force, she held them out of sight. One who has to do this is haunted. The woman looked haunted. Her eyes were unnaturally bright and alert, and shadows had settled beneath them; her cheeks were worn thin; her mouth compressed itself in closing. At twenty-five she looked thirty-five. And yet Miss Hamilton was meant for a beauty--one of the brilliant kind, with clear gray eyes, and a creamy pallor contrasting with profuse black hair. The beautiful head was well set; something vivid and spirited in the whole air of it. Her height was only medium, but she had the carriage of a Jane de Montford, and there were not wanting those who would have described her as tall. While she looked gloomily out, a song she had heard somewhere floated up in her mind: "The years they come, and the years they go, Like winds that blow from sea to sea; From dark to dark they come and go, All in the dew-fall and the rain." It was like a dreary bitter wind sobbing about the chimneys when the storm is rising. She turned hastily from the window, and began counting the hideous phantoms of bouquets on the cheap wall-paper, thinking that they might be the lost souls of flowers that had been wicked in life; roses that had tempted, and lilies that had lied. The room, she found, was sixteen bouquets long, and fourteen and a half wide. When her eyes began to ache with this employment, she took up a book, and, opening it at random, read: "A still small voice said unto me, 'Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?'" Was everything possessed to torment her? She dropped the book, and looked about in search of distraction. In the window opposite her stood her little easel with a partly finished cabinet photograph on it a man's face, with bushy whiskers, round eyes, an insignificant nose, the expression full of a weak fierceness superficially fell and determined, as though a lamb should try to look like a lion. {38} One eye was sharply finished; and, as Margaret glanced at the picture, this stared at her in so grotesque and threatening a manner that she burst into a nervous laugh. "I must turn your face to the wall, Cyclops, till I can give you another eye," she said, suiting the action to the word.