Madame de Rouaillout’s present to her was a photograph of M. de Croisnel, his daughter and son in a group.  Rosamund could not bear to look at the face of Renee, and she put it out of sight.  But she had looked.  She was reduced to look again.

Roland stood beside his father’s chair; Renee sat at his feet, clasping his right hand.  M. de Croisnel’s fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin told the story of the family reunion.  He was dying:  his two children were nursing him to the end.

Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renee:  but on which does the eye linger longest—­which draws the heart? a radiant landscape, where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the stately march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark water?

Dark-eyed Renee was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but a divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain sweetness or majesty.  There are touches of bliss in anguish that superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal in the variable.  These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved them in vibrating unison.  Only to look at her face, without hearing her voice, without the charm of her speech, was to feel it.  On Cecilia’s entering the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret, Rosamund handed her the card of the photographic artist of Tours, mentioning no names.

‘I should say the portrait is correct.  A want of spirituality,’ Rosamund said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after that manner of fastening upon what there is not in a piece of Art or nature.

Cecilia’s avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher mark.

She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was.  She sat over the portrait blushing burningly:  ‘And that is a brother?’ she said.

‘That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,’ said Rosamund.

Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features.  Renee enchained her.  Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French face came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew from the tremulous mouth.  The eyes? were they quivering with internal light, or were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of the eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some borderland between lustreful significance and the mists?  She caught at the nerves like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a stringed instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable.  Yet she sat there at her father’s feet gazing out into the world indifferent to spectators, indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness.  Her left hand clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor with the other