A young woman,
whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local origin,
and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to bury herself,'
to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name, and still more the
name of him whose heart she had once held, but had been unable to keep,
were unknown there, stood framed in a window from which she had no outlook
beyond the boat that was moored beside her door. She raised her eyes with
an air of distraction when she heard, through the trees that lined the
bank, the voices of passers-by of whom, before they came in sight, she
might be certain that never had they known, nor would they know, the
faithless lover, that nothing in their past lives bore his imprint, which
nothing in their future would have occasion to receive. One felt that in
her renunciation of life she had willingly abandoned those places in which
she would at least have been able to see him whom she loved, for others
where he had never trod. And I watched her, as she returned from some walk
along a road where she had known that he would not appear, drawing from
her submissive fingers long gloves of a precious, useless charm.
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