A youth, decked out in the most fantastic fopperies of the middle age, stood with clasped hands and brimming eyes, as remorse and pleasure struggled in his face; and as he looked, the fierce sensual features seemed to melt, and his flesh came again to him like the flesh of a little child.

The slave forgot his fetters; little children clapped their hands; and the toil-worn, stunted, savage woman sprung forward to kneel at her feet, and see herself transfigured in that new and divine ideal of her sex.
Descriptions of drawings are clumsy things at best; the reader must fill up the sketch for himself by the eye of faith.
Entranced in wonder and pleasure, Argemone let her eyes wander over the drawing.

And her feelings for Lancelot amounted almost to worship, as she apprehended the harmonious unity of the manifold conception,--the rugged boldness of the groups in front, the soft grandeur of the figure which was the lodestar of all their emotions- -the virginal purity of the whole.

And when she fancied that she traced in those bland aquiline lineaments, and in the crisp ringlets which floated like a cloud down to the knees of the figure, some traces of her own likeness, a dream of a new destiny flitted before her,--she blushed to her very neck; and as she bent her face over the drawing and gazed, her whole soul seemed to rise into her eyes, and a single tear dropped upon the paper.

She laid her hand over it, and then turned hastily away.
'You do not like it! I have been too bold,'-- said Lancelot, fearfully.
'Oh, no! no! It is so beautiful--so full of deep wisdom! But--but- -You may leave it.' Lancelot slipped silently out of the room, he hardly knew why; and when he was gone, Argemone caught up the drawing, pressed it to her bosom, covered it with kisses, and hid it, as too precious for any eyes but her own, in the farthest corner of her secretaire.
And yet she fancied that she was not in love! The vicar saw the growth of this intimacy with a fast-lengthening face; for it was very evident that Argemone could not serve two masters so utterly contradictory as himself and Lancelot, and that either the lover or the father-confessor must speedily resign office.