To-day, as Madame Odille Orme leaned back in her luxuriously cushioned chair, she seemed quite as a statue, save the restless movements of her slender fingers, which twined and intertwined continually; while the concentrated gaze of the imperial eyes never stirred from the open window, whence she saw—­not Parisian monuments of civic glory and martial splendour—­only her own past, her haunting skull and cross-bones of the Bygone.  Her violet-coloured dressing-gown was unbuttoned at the throat, exposing the graceful turn of the neck, and the proud poise of the perfectly modelled head, from which the shining hair fell like Danae’s shower, framing the face and figure on a back ground as golden as that of some carefully preserved Byzantine picture.

At last the heavily fringed lids quivered, drooped, the magnificent eyes closed as if to shut out some vision too torturing even for their brave penetrating gaze, and in her rigid whiteness she seemed some unearthly creature, who had done for ever with feverish life and the frail toys of time.

Raising her arms above her head, she rested her clasped hands upon her brow, and in a low, strangely quiet tone her words dropped like icicles.

“It was a groundless fear, that when the long-sought opportunity came my weak womanish nature would betray me, and I should fail, break down utterly under the crushing weight of tender memories, sacred associations.  What are they?

“Three dreamy weeks of delirious wifehood, balanced by thirteen years of toil, aspersion, hatred, persecution; goaded by want, pursued ceaselessly by the scorpion scourge whose slanderous lash coiled ever after my name, my reputation.  Three weeks a bride,—­unrecognized as such even then,—­twelve years an outcast,—­repudiated, insulted,—­mother and child, denied, derided,—­cast off as a serpent’s skin!—­Ah, memory! thou hast no charm to stir the blackened ashes in a heart extinguished by the steady sleet of a husband’s repudiation.  When love is dead, and regret is decently buried, and the song of hope is hushed for ever, then revenge mounts the chariot and gathers the reins in her hands of steel; and beyond the writhing hearts whose blood dyes her rushing wheels sees only the goal.  Some wise anatomists of that frail yet invincible sphinx—­woman’s nature, babble of one weighty fact, one conquering law,—­that only the mother-joy, the mother-love, fully unseals the slumbering sweetness and latent tenderness of her being; for me, maternity opened the sluices of a sea of hate and gall.  Had I never felt the velvet touch of tiny fingers on my cheek, a husband’s base desertion might in time have been forgiven, possibly at least, forgotten; but the first wail from my baby’s lips awoke the wolf in me.  My wrongs might slumber till that last assize, when the pitying eyes of Christ sum up the record, but hers—­have made a hungry panther of my soul.  Come, memory, unlock your treasure house, uncoil your spells, chant all your witching strains, and let us see whether the towers of Notre Dame will not tremble and dissolve as soon as I?”