While her extraordinary beauty moved his heart as no other woman had yet done, the stern bitterness of her rebuke appealed to the latent chivalry and slumbering nobility of his worldly soul.  Looking upon his flushed handsome face, interpreting its eloquent varying expressions by the aid of glancing lights which memory snatched from long-gone years, she saw the struggle in his dual nature, and hurried on, warned by the powerful magnetism of his almost invincible eyes that the melting spell of the Past was twining its relaxing fingers about the barred gateway of her own throbbing heart.

“Trained in the easy school of latitudinarianism so fashionable nowaday on both sides of the Atlantic, doubtless Mr. Laurance deems his adopted countrywoman a nervous puritanical prude; and upon my primitive and wellnigh obsolete ideal of social decorum and propriety, upon my lofty standard of womanly delicacy and manly honour, I can patiently tolerate none of the encroachments with which I have recently been threatened.  Just here, sir, permit a pertinent illustration of the impertinence that sometimes annoys me.”

Lifting between the tips of her fingers the pretty peach-bloom-tinted note, whose accusing characters betrayed the hand that penned it, she continued, with an outbreak of intense and overwhelming contempt: 

“Listen, if you please, to the turbid libation which some rose-lipped Paris, some silk-locked Sybarite poured out last night, after leaving the theatre.  Under the pretence of adding a leaf to the chaplets, won by what he is pleased to tern ‘diving dramatic genius,’ this ’Jules Duval’—­let me see, I would not libel an honourable name; yes, so it is signed—­this Jules Duval, this brainless, heartless, soulless Narcissus, with no larger sense of honour than could find ample waltzing room on the point of a cambric needle, insolently avows his real sentiments in language that your valet might address to his favourite grisette; and closes like some ardent accepted lover, with an audacious demand for my photograph, ’to wear for ever over his fond and loyal heart!’ That is fashionable homage to my genius—­it is?  I call it an insult to my womanhood!  Nay—­I am ashamed to read it!  ’Twould stain my cheeks, soil my lips, dishonour your gentlemanly ears.  Mr. Laurance, if ever you should become a husband, and truly love the woman you make your wife, you will perhaps comprehend my feelings, when some gay unprincipled gallant profanes the sanctity of her retirement with such unpardonable, such unmerited insolence.”

She held it up between thumb and forefinger, shaking out the pink folds till the signature in violet ink flaunted before the violet eyes of its owner, then, crushing it as if it were a cobweb, she tossed it toward the window.

Turning her head, she said in an altered and elevated tone: 

“Mrs. Waul, may I disturb you for a moment?”

The quiet figure, clad in sober grey, and wearing a muslin cap whose crimped ruffle enclosed in a snowy frame the benevolent wrinkled countenance, came forward, knitting in hand, spectacles on her nose, and for the first time the visitor became aware of her presence.