These blinds were very old.  They had been her grandmother’s when she was Marguerite’s age; and one day, not long before this, Marguerite, pillaging the attic, had found them and brought them down, with adoring eyes, and put them up before her own windows.  They were of thin muslin, and on them were painted scenes representing the River of Life, with hills and castles, valleys and streams, in a long series; at the end there was a faint vision of a crystal dome in the air—­the Celestial City—­nearly washed away.  You looked at these scenes through the arches of a ruined castle.  A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life.  At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding an hour-glass.

Marguerite lay on her side, sleepily contemplating the whole scene between her thick, bosky lashes.  She liked everything but the winged woman holding the hour-glass.  Had she been that woman, she would have dropped the hour-glass into the blue, burying water, and have reached up her hand for the young man to draw her into the boat with him.  And she would have taken off her wings and cast them away upon the hurrying river.  To have been alone with him, no hour-glass, no wings, rowing away on Life’s long voyage, past castles and valleys, and never ending woods and streams!  As to the Celestial City, she would have liked her blinds better if the rains of her grandmother’s youth had washed it away altogether.  It was not the desirable end of such a journey:  she did not care to land there.

Marguerite slipped drowsily over to the edge of the bed in order to be nearer the blinds; and she began to study what was left of the face of the young man just starting on his adventures from the house of his fathers.  Who was he?  Of whom did he cause her to think?  She sat up in bed and propped her face in the palms of her hands—­the April face with its October eyes—­and lapsed into what had been her dreams of the night.  The laces of her nightgown dropped from her wrists to her elbows; the masses of her hair, like sunlit autumn maize, fell down over her neck and shoulders into the purity of the bed.

Until the evening of her party the world had been to Marguerite something that arranged all her happiness and never interfered with it.  Only soundness and loveliness of nature, inborn, undestroyable, could have withstood such luxury, indulgence, surfeit as she had always known.

On that night which was designed to end for her the life of childhood, she had, for the first time, beheld the symbol of the world’s diviner beauty—­a cross.  All her guests had individually greeted her as though each were happier in her happiness.  Except one—­he did not care.  He had spoken to her upon entering with the manner of one who wished himself elsewhere, he alone brought no tribute to her of any kind, in his eyes, by his smile, through the pressure of his hand.