She reached the gates and paused a moment. The little breezes that had brought the flowers to him stopped their play; her scarf's floating ends--gossamer and delicately painted--came softly to her sides. You might have said that the night airs had heralded her here, had taken form in her scarf's ends to attend her as she walked, and now awaited which way she should please to move. Snow-White-and-Rose-Red! The childish appreciation of her, aroused in him years before, returned to him again. Snow-White-and-Rose-Red--that was she! As when a child he had been caused a childish wonder and a child's unspoilt delight at so rare a thing as she appeared to him, so now, seeing her for the first time with the new eyes that belonged to his new condition, he felt himself amazed and almost awed that beauty could have this degree. Snow-White-and-Rose-Red! All she had promised in her girlish years dowered her now in the burgeoning of her maidenhood--and dowered more than it had told, as all the beauty of the opening bud scarcely can hint the opened blossom's beauty; and dowered more than it had told by the increasing strangeness, as she grew, of this rare perfection of each feature in one face. Rare, strangely rare, the transparent fairness of her skin; rare, rare that almost crimson shade on either cheek, sharply defined, not blended, as it were frozen there; rare the dark pansy of her wide and stilly eyes; rare, most rare of all, transcending all, the high air with which she bore herself--that her chaste and faultless face maintained, with which her eyes looked and that her presence seemed to make. He saw her dress. He saw her scarf to be some filmy veil about her shoulders and that beneath it all her throat was bare. He saw that it was turned about her throat in a loose fold that lay where her bosom was disclosed by the silk evening gown she wore, draped low, but maidenly discreet. At throat, at breast, at arms, at hands, he saw this filmy thing was challenged of its whiteness and seemed to take a shade. She moved; he thought to speak. Mystery was here and held him on its threshold. Watching her he had a sudden new conception of her quality. Later, when he had spoken to her, when he had left her, when he trod again each passage of their meeting, recalled her voice, her mode of speech, and how she bore herself, he recalled that conception and knew it was most proper to her, and thrilled to know it so. As he looked, and afterwards as he remembered, he conceived the word that estimated all her beauty, all her quality and her degree--frozen. Frozen and thus invested with the strange rareness that frozen beauty has. Frozen and thus most proper that those flames upon her cheeks never could stain beyond themselves, as blood that will not run in snow; proper the quaint precision of the words she used, as icicles broken in a cold hand; proper the high pitch of her voice, curiously hard, without modulations, as winter sounds are hard.