"How strange!" said Marion. "If my hands were as free as yours are, I should like nothing better than for them to be as empty—if you can call hands empty that have such a power."
"And are not your hands as free as mine?" asked the other. "We are both orphans, and both—"
"Poor," said Marion, frankly. "Yes, but with a difference. Most people, I suppose, would think the difference in my favor; I think it is in yours. You have no family obligations to prevent your doing what you will with your life, from following the bent of your genius; while I—well, it is true I have no genius, but if I had it would be all the same. My uncle would never consent to my doing anything to lower the family dignity, and I owe him enough to make me feel bound to respect his wishes."
"It is well to have some one whose wishes one is bound to respect," said Claire gently, and then a silence fell.
They were decided contrasts, these three girls, as they stood together by the open window, and looked out on the bright sunset and down into the large garden;—decided contrasts, yet all possessed in greater or less degree the gift of beauty.
It was certainly in greater degree with Marion Lynde, whose daily expanding loveliness had been the marvel of all who saw her for two years past;—the marvel even in this quiet convent, where human aspect was perhaps of less account than any where else on all God's earth. The little children had looked with admiration on her brilliant face, the older girls had gazed on it with throbs of unconscious envy; the nuns had glanced pityingly at the girl who bore so proudly that often fatal dower; and many times the Mother Superior had sent up a special prayer for this defiant soldier of life, when she saw her kneeling at Mass or Benediction with a many-tinted glory streaming over her head.
As she stood now in her simple school dress, Marion was a picture of striking beauty. Tall, slight, graceful, there was in her grace something imperial and unlike other women. Her white skin, finely grained and colorless as the petal of a lily, suited the regular, clear-cut features; while her eyes were large and dark—splendid eyes, which seemed to carry lustre in their sweeping glance,—and her hair was a mass of red gold. Altogether a face to study with a sense of artistic pleasure,—a face to admire as one admires a statue or a painting; but not a face that attracted or wakened love, as many less beautiful faces do, or as that of her cousin, Helen Morley, did.
For everyone loved Helen—a winsome creature, with lips that seemed formed only for smiles, and hands ever ready to caress and aid; with endearing ways that the hardest heart could not have resisted, and a heaven-born capacity for loving that seemed inexhaustible. It was impossible to look on the bright young face and think that sorrow could ever darken it, or that tears would ever dim the clear violet of those joyous eyes. From the Mother Superior down to the youngest scholar, all loved the girl, and all recognized how entirely she seemed marked out for happy destinies. "You must not let the brightness of this world veil Heaven from your sight, my child," the nuns would say, as they laid their hands on the silken-soft head, and longed to hold back from the turmoil of life this white dove, whose wings were already spread for flight from the quiet haven where they had been folded for a time.
Least beautiful of the three girls was Claire Alford,—a girl whose reserved manner had perhaps kept love as well as familiarity at bay during the years of her convent tutelage. Even Marion, with all her haughty waywardness, had more friends than this quiet student. Yet no one could find fault with Claire. She was always considerate and gentle, quick to oblige and slow to take offense. But she lived a life absorbed within itself, and those around her felt this. They felt that her eyes were fixed on some distant goal, to which every thought of her mind and effort of her nature was directed.
The only child and orphan of a struggling artist—a man of genius, but who died before he conquered the recognition of the world,—Claire knew that her slender fortune would hardly suffice for the expenses of her education, and that afterward she must look for aid to herself alone. Usually life goes hard with a woman under such circumstances as these. But Claire had one power as a weapon with which to fight her way. Her talent for painting had been the astonishment of all her teachers, and it was a settled thing that she would make art the object and pursuit of her life. If least beautiful of the three girls who stood there together, an observant glance might have lingered longest on her. There was something very attractive in the gray eyes that gazed so steadily from under their long lashes, and in the smile that stirred now and then the usually grave and gentle lips.