very dark, though red showed through it in a strong light, and her
cheeks had the dusky pink of an October peach. But it was the eyes that
held and allowed no forgetting; Ravenel always held they were violet,
and Josef, who saw her every day for years, spoke them gray; but Dermott
McDermott was firm as to their being blue until the day she visited him
about the railroad business, when he afterward described them "as black
as chaos," adding a word or two about her deil's temper as well. The
truth was that the color of them changed with her emotions, but the
wistfulness of them remained ever the same. Dermott, in some lines he
wrote of her in Paris, described them as "corn-flowers in a mist filled
with the poetry and passion of a great and misunderstood people," and
though "over-poetic," as he himself said afterward, "the thought was
none so bad."

Suddenly the languor seemed to leave her, and she stood alert, chin
drawn in, hands clasped before her, and began the recitative to the
"_Ah! Fors e lui_." Twice she stopped abruptly, taking a tone a second
time, listening as she did so, her head, birdlike, on one side with a
concentrated attention. After the last low note, which was round and low
like an organ tone, she resumed her old position with arms outstretched
upon the fence.

As Frank came up the path their eyes met, and he removed his hat,
holding it at his side, as one who did not intend to resume it. Standing
thus, he bore himself, if one might use the word of a man, with a
certain sweetness, an entire seeming self-forgetfulness, as though the
one to whom he spoke occupied his entire thought.

"It is Miss Dulany?" he inquired, with a smile which seemed to ask
pardon for his temerity.