A Heart's Bitterness — page 40: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

92. A HEART'S) BITTERNESS. of heart-life, had come to her; love had risen as a new day that dawns rosily in the east, and love had paled and _per- ished, as when thick mists enwrap and vail that new-born Never, since the first period of that love and loss, had Violet recalled so clearly those hours in Lincolnshire, as _ this day, sitting alone before the Venus of the Louvre. Marriage with its trembling hopes, its bitter, crushing - disappointments, had sharpened all her perceptions and intensified all her emotions. That terrible, yet often blessed capacity for loving, which Lady Burton said was hers, was awake now in full force, and, alas, had in her husband no object. No wretch drifting shipwrecked on desolate seas, no trembler on the limit of a precipice, no victim of fell dis- ease, quivering on the verge of death, was that hour in more instant and terrible peril than Violet, Countess of Leigh, sitting in the palace of the Louvre, and dutifully watched, from a distance, by a maid and a groom. Her peril was from her own heart. She saw that dark, bird-haunted, fern-carpeted wood, stretching around the grange. Wandering there alone one laughing summer day, herself fair as a young Hebe, she had come upon a beautiful Antinous sleeping in the wood. She had almost. trodden on him as he lay asleep, his hands un- der his comely head, his curls damp with the dews of slum- ber, his throat stirred by each deep, healthy inspiration, as he lay in a bed of aromatic fern. She had stopped, held her breath, and gazed as one spell-bound by the beauty of a young god. Awe at first of a strange presence. ‘Then, grown more familiar, curiosity. What color were his eyes? What would be the tones of his voice? She was young, and she had scarcely seen young creatures of her own rank, near her age, certainly almost none of what her grand- mother deemed a dangerous sex. And she had looked and a - wondered, until the exuberant child-spirit mastered her; for childhood had hardly as yet yielded its place to girlhood in her soul, and, intent on mischief, leaning forward, with a Jong spray of grass, softly pulled from among the fern, she had touched the sleeper’s lips. ‘Then his eyes had opened, eyes like heaven’s own blue. | he acquaintance, began in mischief and merriment, © _ passed quickly into love. Like two happy children, Violet (E(@) comichbooks