A figure rose at the opening of the door, and
came towards me with outstretched hands.
"Lucia!"
My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and
poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within
the first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I
recognised that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but
nevertheless distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman
since I had seen her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She
had awakened. It was a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to
me now; a woman awake to her own powers, conscious of the sceptre,
and the gifts, and the kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a
woman for a few years, I felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in
her advance towards me, heard it in the soft tones of her voice as
she said,--
"Well, Victor, are you glad I have come?"
And it was with my heart suddenly beating hard, and my face pale,
and a mist before my eyes, that I came forward to her. What had been
the first slight shock to her sleeping woman's passions I had no
idea.
Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she passed
him in a crowd had suddenly struck through the ice of her
abstraction. Perhaps some pressure of an arm meaning she did not
even comprehend. Perhaps some word, overheard between two men, whose
meaning she did not even comprehend.
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