“Good-night! Good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good-night till it be morrow!”
The speaker was a young girl, who stood in the middle of the room, her hands clasped, her head bent forward, her eyes fixed in a dreamy rapture, and the remark was addressed to—no one.
She paused, sighed a little—not from impatience, but with a wistful dissatisfaction—and absently moved to the window, through which the last rays of the June sun were flickering redly.
She stood there for a moment or two, then began to pace the room with a lithe, undulating grace. It was a pity that she was alone, because such beauty and grace were wasted on the desert air of the rather grim and dingy room. It was a pity that Sir John Everett Millais, or Mr. Edwin Long, or some other of the great portrait painters were not present to transfer her beauty of face and form, for it was a loveliness of no common order.
Many a poet’s pen had attempted to describe Doris Marlowe, but it may safely be said that not one had succeeded; and not even a great portrait painter could have depicted the mobility of her clear, oval face, and its dark eyes and sensitive lips—eyes and lips so full of expression that people were sometimes almost convinced that she had spoken before she had uttered a word.