because there was something in her face, in her figure, in her whole
carriage, that moved the boy suddenly as she looked at him and sent the
blood rushing to his cheeks and forehead.

She seemed young, but he never thought of her age. In reality she was
nine-and-twenty years old but looked younger. She was pale, far paler
than the little girl, but she had those same violet eyes, large, deep and
sorrowful, beneath dark, smooth eyebrows that arched high and rose a
little in the middle. Her mouth was perhaps large for her face but her
full lips curved gently and seemed able to smile, though she was not
smiling. Her nose was perhaps too small--her face was far from
faultless--and it had the slightest tendency to turn up instead of down,
but it was so delicately modelled that an artist would have pardoned it
that deviation from the classic. Thick brown hair waved across her white
forehead and was hidden under the black bonnet and the veil thrown back
over it. She was dressed in black and the close-fitting gown showed off
with unconscious vanity the lines of a perfectly moulded and perfectly
supple figure. But it was especially her eyes which attracted John's
sudden attention at that first glance, her violet eyes, tender, sad,
almost pathetic, seeming to ask sympathy and marvellously able to command
it.

It was but for a moment that she paused. Then came the vicar, following
her from the drawing-room, and all three went on. Presently Short heard
the front door open and Mr. Ambrose shouted to the fly.

"Muggins! Muggins!"

No one had ever been able to say why Abraham Boosey, the publican, had
christened his henchman with an appellation so vulgar, to say the least