To steady my thoughts and bring my whirling brain again under control, I
fixed my eyes on her well-known form and features as upon a stranger's
whom I would understand and judge. I have called her a woman and
certainly I had loved her as such, but as, in this moment of strange
detachment, I watched her descend, swaying foot following swaying foot
falteringly down the stairs, I was able to see that only the emotions
which denaturalised her expression were a woman's; that her features, her
pose, and the peculiar childlike contour of the one cheek open to view
were those of one whose yesterday was in the playroom.

But beautiful! You do not often see such beauty. Under all the
disfigurement of an agitation so great as to daunt me and make me
question if I were its sole cause, her face shone with an individual
charm which marked her out as one of the few who are the making or
marring of men, sometimes of nations. This is the heritage she was born
to, this her lot, not to be shirked, not to be evaded even now at her
early age of seventeen. So much any one could see even in a momentary
scrutiny of her face and figure. But what was not so clear, not even to
myself with the consciousness of what had passed between us during the
last few hours, was why her heart should have so outrun her years, and
the emotion I beheld betray such shuddering depths. Some grisly fear,
some staring horror had met her in this strange retreat. Simple grief
speaks with a different language from that which I read in her distorted
features and tottering, slowly creeping form. What had happened above?
She had escaped me to run upon what? My lips refused to ask, my limbs
refused to move, and if I breathed at all, I did so with such fierceness
of restraint that her eyes never turned my way, not even when she had
reached the lowest step and paused for a moment there, oscillating in
pain or uncertainty. Her face was turned more fully towards me now, and I
had just begun to discern something in it besides its tragic beauty, when