Still, in everything pertaining to her
womanhood she is wholly feminine and simple-hearted as a child.
Now, as of old, she bounds through the spacious grounds of
Collingwood, trips over the grassy lawn, dances up the stairs, and
fills the once gloomy old place with a world of melody and
sunlight. Edith knows that she is beautiful! old Rachel has told
her so a thousand times, while Victor, the admiring valet, tells
her so every day, taking to himself no little credit for having
taught her, as he thinks, something of Parisian manners. Many are
the conversations she holds with him in his mother tongue, for she
has learned to speak that language with a fluency and readiness
which astonished her teachers and sometimes astonished herself. It
did not seem difficult to her, but rather like an old friend, and
Marie at first was written on every page of Ollendorff. But Marie
has faded now almost entirely from her mind, as have those other
mysterious memories which used to haunt her so. Nothing but the
hair hidden in the chest binds her to the past, and at this she
often looks, wondering where the head it once adorned is lying,
whether in the noisy city or on some grassy hillside where the
wild flowers she loves best are growing, and the birds whose songs
she tries to imitate, pause sometimes to warble a requiem for the
dead.
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