“I am Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre.”

How time can change! Little Polly wore in her pale, small features, her fairy symmetry, her varying expression, a certain promise of interest and grace; but Paulina Mary was become beautiful⁠—not with the beauty that strikes the eye like a rose⁠—orbed, ruddy, and replete; not with the plump, and pink, and flaxen attributes of her blond cousin Ginevra; but her seventeen years had brought her a refined and tender charm which did not lie in complexion, though hers was fair and clear; nor in outline, though her features were sweet, and her limbs perfectly turned; but, I think, rather in a subdued glow from the soul outward. This was not an opaque vase, of material however costly, but a lamp chastely lucent, guarding from extinction, yet not hiding from worship, a flame vital and vestal. In speaking of her attractions, I would not exaggerate language; but, indeed, they seemed to me very real and engaging. What though all was on a small scale, it was the perfume which gave this white violet distinction, and made it superior to the broadest camelia⁠—the fullest dahlia that ever bloomed.

“Ah! and you remember the old time at Bretton?”

“Better,” said she, “better, perhaps, than you. I remember it with minute distinctness: not only the time, but the days of the time, and the hours of the days.”

“You must have forgotten some things?”

“Very little, I imagine.”

“You were then a little creature of quick feelings: you must, long ere this, have outgrown the impressions with which joy and grief, affection and bereavement, stamped your mind ten years ago.”

“You think I have forgotten whom I liked, and in what degree I liked them when a child?”

“The sharpness must be gone⁠—the point, the poignancy⁠—the deep imprint must be softened away and effaced?”

“I have a good memory for those days.”