Page:Des Grieux, The Prelude to Teleny.djvu/43

 midnight she sank into a deep death-like sleep. Just before the chimes had sounded, she heard, as in a dream, a low, plaintive tune; it seemed like an oft-repeated swelling musical cadence, ever sinking and swelling like the surging of the waves, and as she listened she dreamt that her mother was leaning over her cradle, singing to her, and patting her to rest.

How beautiful she looked as she lay there so lifelessly quiet. As the night was very hot she had thrown off the bed-clothes and her fine lawn chemise hardly veiled her fair body, leaving moreover her nakedness uncovered.

The Arabs, the Turks and all the Oriental nations have always compared a woman's beauty to the full-moon, and in fact the young girl's graceful body had such a pearly whiteness in some parts, and was so pale and grey in others, that, touched up here with a faint pinkish flush or shaded there with slight bluish tints, it seemed to possess all the iridiscent tones and all the opaline milkiness of the harvest moon's soft mellow light.

She was very young—hardly sixteen years