rafters of that leather-hung room, with its ebony furniture and portieres of silken damask, and its tall chimney-piece, the whole so softly lighted, was still his very own.  The poor father felt the tears in his eyes and hastened to wipe them.  A father who loves his daughter longs to keep her always a child; as for him who can without deep pain see her fall under the dominion of another man, he does not rise to worlds superior, he falls to lowest space.

“What ails you, my son?” said his old mother, taking off her spectacles, and seeking the cause of his silence and of the change in his usually joyous manner.

The old physician signed to the old mother to look at his daughter, nodding his head with satisfaction as if to say, “How sweet she is!”

What father would not have felt Beauvouloir’s emotion on seeing the young girl as she stood there in the Norman dress of that period?  Gabrielle wore the corset pointed before and square behind, which the Italian masters give almost invariably to their saints and their madonnas.  This elegant corselet, made of sky-blue velvet, as dainty as that of a dragon-fly, enclosed the bust like a guimpe and compressed it, delicately modelling the outline as it seemed to flatten; it moulded the shoulders, the back, the waist, with the precision of a drawing made by an able draftsman, ending around the neck in an oblong curve, adorned at the edges with a slight embroidery in brown silks, leaving to view as much of the bare throat as was needed to show the beauty of her womanhood, but not enough to awaken desire.  A full brown skirt, continuing the lines already drawn by the velvet waist, fell to her feet in narrow flattened pleats.  Her figure was so slender that Gabrielle seemed tall; her arms hung pendent with the inertia that some deep thought imparts to the attitude.  Thus standing, she presented a living model of those ingenuous works of statuary a taste for which prevailed at that period,—­works which obtained admiration for the harmony of their lines, straight without stiffness, and for the firmness of a design which did not exclude vitality.  No swallow, brushing the window-panes at dusk, ever conveyed the idea of greater elegance of outline.

Gabrielle’s face was thin, but not flat; on her neck and forehead ran bluish threads showing the delicacy of a skin so transparent that the flowing of the blood through her veins seemed visible.  This excessive whiteness was faintly tinted with rose upon the cheeks.  Held beneath a little coif of sky-blue velvet embroidered with pearls, her hair, of an even tone, flowed like two rivulets of gold from her temples and played in ringlets on her neck, which it did not hide.  The glowing color of those silky locks brightened the dazzling whiteness of the neck, and purified still further by its reflections the outlines of the face already so pure.  The eyes, which were long and as if pressed between their lids, were in harmony with the delicacy of the head