Yet the picture clung to his memory.
As he slowly paced the room to-day, thinking of this woman as his wife, light blue eyes and yellow hair and the unclean sweetness of jasmine-flowers mixed with the hot sunshine and smells of the mill.

He could think of her in no other light.

He might have done so; for the poor girl had her other sides for view.

She had one of those sharp, tawdry intellects whose possessors are always reckoned "brilliant women, fine talkers." She was (aside from the necessary sarcasm to keep up this reputation) a good-humoured soul enough,--when no one stood in her way.

But if her shallow virtues or vices were palpable at all to him, they became one with the torpid beauty of the oppressive summer day, and weighed on him alike with a vague disgust.