Appetite at present lie had none, but the pretence of eating was a way of passing the time; so he descended and sat down at the prepared table.
His wandering eyes fell on one of the ornaments of the room--Mrs.
Brewer's album.

On first coming to live in the house, two years ago, he had examined this collection of domestic portraits, and subsequently, from time to time, had taken up the album to look at one photograph which interested him.

Among an assemblage of types excelling in ugliness of feature and hideousness of costume--types of toil-worn age, of ungainly middle life, and of youth lacking every grace, such as are exhibited in the albums of the poor--there was discoverable one female portrait in which, the longer he gazed at it, Hilliard found an ever-increasing suggestiveness of those qualities he desired in woman.
Unclasping the volume, he opened immediately at this familiar face.

A month or two had elapsed since he last regarded it, and the countenance took possession of him with the same force as ever.
It was that of a young woman probably past her twentieth year.

Unlike her neighbours in the album, she had not bedizened herself before sitting to be portrayed.