noon
Although nine years had elapsed since we saw her first , in the mellow lamplight of Mr. Hargrove 's library , time had touched her so daintily , so lovingly , that only two lines were discernible about the mouth , where habitual compression has set its print ; and it would have been difficult to realize that she was twenty-eight , had not the treacherous eyes betrayed the gloom , the bitterness , the ceaseless heartache that filled them with shadows , which prematurely aged the whole countenance . The added years seemed only to have ripened and perfected her exquisite beauty , but with the rounded smoothness , and the fresh , pure colouring of youth was mingled a weird indescribable expression of stern hopelessness , of solemn repose , as if she had deliberately shaken hands for ever with all that makes life bright and precious , and were fronting with calm smile and quiet pulses a grim and desperate conflict , which she well knew could have an end only in the peace of the pall , that long truce , whose signal is the knell and the requiem . Had she been reared amid the fatalistic influences of Arabia , she could not have more completely adopted and exemplified the marble motto : `` Despair is a free man ; Hope is a slave . '' For her the rosy mist that usually hovers over futurity had been swept rudely aside , the softening glow of the To-Come had been precipitated into a dull , pitiless leaden ever present , at which she never raved nor railed , but inflexibly fought on , expecting neither sunshine nor succour , unappalled and patient as some stony figure of Fate , which chiselled when the race was young , feels the shrouding sands of centuries drifting around and over it , but makes no moan over the buried youth , and watches the approaching night with the same calm , steadfast gaze that looked upon the starry dawn , and the golden glory of the noon . The cautious repression which necessity had long ago rendered habitual had crystallized into a mask , which even when alone she rarely laid aside for an instant . In actual life , and among strong positive natures , the deepest feelings find no vent in the effervescence of passionate verbal outbreaks , and outside the charmed precincts of the tragic stage , the world would not tolerate the raving Hamlets and Othellos , the Macbeths and Medeas , that scowl and storm and anathematize so successfully in the magic glow of the footlights . 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 .