"Knew what?"
Her face in yonder mirror has a strange, introverted expression, as if she were scanning her own soul. Her brow contracts with thought and perplexity.
Gradually a warm, beautiful light steals into her face, transforming it as from the scowl of a winter morning into a dawn of June; her eyes become gentle and tender. A rich color comes out upon her cheeks, spreads up her temples, mantles her brow, and pours a crimson torrent down her snowy neck. Suddenly she drops her burning face into her hands, and hides a vision one would gladly look longer upon. But see, even her little ears have become as red as coral.
The bleakest landscape in the world brightens into something like beauty when the sun shines upon it. So love, the richer, sweeter light of the soul, make the plainest face almost beautiful; but when it changed Christine Ludolph's faultless, yet too cold and classical, features into those of a loving woman's, it suggested a beauty scarcely human.
A moment later there came a faint whisper: "I fear—I almost fear I love him." Then she lifted a startled, frightened face and looked timidly around as if, in truth, walls had ears.
Reassured by the consciousness of solitude, her head dropped on her wrist and her revery went forward. Her eyes became dreamy, and a half-smile played upon her lips as she recalled proof after proof of his affection, for she knew the cruel words of the last interview were the result of misunderstanding.
But suddenly she darted from her seat and began pacing the room in the strongest perturbation.
"Mocked again!" she cried; "the same cruel fate! my old miserable experience in a new aspect! With everything within my reach, save the one thing I want, I possess the means of all kinds of happiness except that which makes me happy. In every possible way I am pledged to a career and future in which he can take no part. Though my heart is full of the strangest, sweetest chaos, and I do not truly understand myself, yet I am satisfied that this is not a school-girl's fancy. But my father would regard it as the old farce repeated. Already he suspects and frowns upon the matter. I should have to break with him utterly and forever. I should have to give up all my ambitious plans and towering hopes of life abroad. A plain Mrs. in this city of shops is a poor substitute for a countess's coronet and a villa on the Rhine."
Her cheek flushed, and her lip curled.
"That indeed would be the very extravagance of romance, and how could I, least of all, who so long have scoffed at such things, explain my action? These mushroom shopkeepers, who were all nobodies the other day, elevate their eyebrows when a merchant's daughter marries her father's clerk. But when would the wonder cease if a German lady of rank followed suit?