The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the
dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a
large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing,
resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually
low down on her forehead. Her expression--bright, frank, and
intelligent--appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether
wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and
pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive
is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders
that a sculptor would have longed to model--to be charmed by the
modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs
betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost
repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features
in which the perfectly shaped figure ended--was to feel a
sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all
in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and
contradictions of a dream.
"Mr. Hartright?" said the lady interrogatively, her dark face
lighting up with a smile, and softening and growing womanly the
moment she began to speak. "We resigned all hope of you last
night, and went to bed as usual.
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