Half concealed beneath the draperies of the window, near which she had placed herself to obtain a more favorable light, the other female pursued her occupation with undistracted attention; a certain gravity appeared in her dress, in her countenance, and in her physiognomy altogether. Her eyes were beautiful, but calmness was their chief expression; her smile was obliging, but momentary; the brilliant hues of youth, now evidently fading on her cheeks, less rounded than once they were, appeared but as the lightest shadings of a picture; sometimes, indeed, deepened by sudden and as transient emotion, like the colors which meteors throw on the clouds of the heavens in the evening storms of summer. The gauzes, the rubies, the jewels, with which the young adorn themselves, were not by her employed merely as ornaments; she availed herself of them, to conceal with taste, the outrages of years; for the weight of more than thirty years was already upon her; and the ingenious head dress with which she had surmounted her hair, served to hide, at the same time, some silvery tell-tales, which had dared thus prematurely, to mingle with her long tresses of blond. “There's broken again! look at that detestable silk!” said the younger female, throwing her work on to a sofa; “I will not do another stitch to day.” She rose, and approaching the mirror before her, amused herself by putting up afresh the curls of her hair. “You want patience, Leopoldine,” answered her sister, looking on her affectionately, “and without that will accomplish nothing. You will require patience as well to conduct you through the world, as to enable you to finish a purse.” “I know the rest, my sister,” replied the younger, smiling. “Do you forget that a certain person has charged himself with the duty of teaching me the lesson? Ten purses, like that which I am embroidering, would not put me out of patience so much as this silence of M. de Berville. Can you conceive what detains him thus?” added she, seating herself near her sister, “for, in fact, he loves me, that is certain, and nothing remains but for him to avow the fact to my aunt Dorothée.” “This looks very like presumption,” my dear Leopoldine, pursued the elder sister, “and that is not good; what can it signify to you what he _thinks!_ I hope your happiness does not depend on him.” “My happiness? oh! doubtless not, but, in a word, Stephanie, he is a suitable person, and if he will explain himself——” “It will then be time to think of him; until then, my sister, I beg of you to see in M. de Berville but an {649} estimable friend of our family, an amiable man whose society we honor. A young person should never hasten to give up her heart—above all, to one who has not asked it.” “Be easy on that subject, sister; I mean to keep a good watch over mine; the venture of your heroine of romance will never tempt me; but this is the fact, sister, I do not wish to remain an _old maid_.”