Not in the window itself, though that was near enough the clouds--but Cosmo, looking down, looked, as his good fortune was, into another window over the way, a pretty second floor, with white curtains and flowers to garnish it, and sunshine that loved to steal in for half the day. It was a pretty point of itself, with its little stand of early-blooming plants, and its white curtains looped up with ribbon. The plants were but early spring flowers, and did not at all screen the bright little window which Cosmo looked at, as though it had been a picture--and even when the evening lamp was lighted, no jealous blinds were drawn across the cheerful light. The lad was not impertinent nor curious, yet he sat in the dusk sometimes, looking down as into the heart of a little sacred picture. There were only two people ever in the room, and these were ladies, evidently a mother and daughter--one of them an invalid. That there was a sofa near the fire, on which some one nearly always lay--that once or twice in the day this recumbent figure was raised from the couch, and the two together paced slowly through the room--and that, perhaps once a week, a little carriage came to the door to take the sick lady out for a drive, was all that Cosmo knew of the second person in this interesting apartment; and the lad may have been supposed to be sufficiently disinterested in his curiosity, when we say that the only face which he ever fully saw at that bright window was the face of an _old_ lady--a face as old as his mother’s. It was she who watered the flowers and looped the curtains--it was she who worked within their slight shadow, always visible--and it was she who, sometimes looking up and catching his eye, smiled either at or to Cosmo, causing him to retreat precipitately for the moment, yet leaving no glance of reproach on his memory to forbid his return.