Frances hardly breathed, as she was enabled, by a movement of Isabella,
to see that it was the figure of a man in the well-known dress of the
Southern horse; but she gasped for breath, and instinctively laid her
hand on her heart to quell its throbbings, as she thought she recognized
the lineaments that were so deeply seated in her own imagination.
Frances felt she was improperly prying into the sacred privacy of
another; but her emotions were too powerful to permit her to speak, and
she drew back to a chair, where she still retained a view of the
stranger, from whose countenance she felt it to be impossible to
withdraw her eyes. Isabella was too much engrossed by her own feelings
to discover the trembling figure of the witness to her actions, and she
pressed the inanimate image to her lips, with an enthusiasm that denoted
the most intense passion. The expression of the countenance of the fair
stranger was so changeable, and the transitions were so rapid, that
Frances had scarcely time to distinguish the character of the emotion,
before it was succeeded by another, equally powerful and equally
attractive. Admiration and sorrow were however the preponderating
passions; the latter was indicated by large drops that fell from her
eyes on the picture, and which followed each other over her cheek at
such intervals, as seemed to pronounce the grief too heavy to admit of
the ordinary demonstrations of sorrow.
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