However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that of the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman’s soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique’s lips were faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure warm blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little heavy, in the acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness which is, according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the indication of an almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her brow, which was finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent diadem of hair, voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color. From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique’s bearing was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the progress of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure. Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows with their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask window-curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly colored; like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so carefully trained upon her window-sill. The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than itself,--the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade, or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well. When some stranger, surprised or interested by the building, stopped before it and gazed at the second story, old Sauviat would poke his head beyond the overhanging projection, certain that he should see his daughter at her window. Then he would retreat into the shop rubbing his hands and saying to his wife in the Auvergne vernacular:-- “Hey! old woman; they’re admiring your daughter!”