Lizzie, perceiving that further persuasion would be useless, turned to leave the room. As she did so, her eyes fell upon the picture of the girl-woman hanging over the mantelshelf. With a cry of delight she stepped close to it. "How beautiful! Is it your portrait, Mrs. Lenoir, when you were a girl? Ah, yes, it is like you." "It is not my portrait, Lizzie." "Whose then? Do you know her? But of course you do. What lovely eyes and hair! It is a face I could never forget if I had once seen it. Who is she?" The expression of hopeless love in Mrs. Lenoir's eyes as she gazed upon the picture was pitiful to see. "It is a portrait painted from a heart's memory, Lizzie." "Painted by you?" "Yes." "How beautifully it is done! I always knew you were a lady. And I've been told you can speak languages. I was a little girl when I heard the story of a poor foreigner dying in this street, who gave you, in a foreign language, his dying message to his friends abroad. That is true, is it not, Mrs. Lenoir?" "It is quite true. It would have been better for me had I been poor and ignorant, and had I not been what you suppose me to have been--a lady. Lizzie, if you love me, leave me!" "Mrs. Lenoir, is there no hope of happiness for you?" "Have I not already told you? I have a hope, a wild, unreasoning hope, springing from the bitterest sorrow that ever fell to woman's lot. Apart from that, my only desire is to live and die in peace. And now, Lizzie, goodnight." Constrained to leave, Lizzie took her departure, saddened by the sadness of this woman of sorrow; but the impress of another's grief soon fades from the heart in which happiness reigns, and, within a few minutes, the girl, in the company of her lover, was again rapt in the contemplation of her own bright dreams.