only surviving children) dashed into view on the dingy old oaken stairs,
with the suddenness of a flash of light; and clearing the last three
steps into the hall at a jump, presented herself breathless in the
breakfast-room to make the family circle complete.


By one of those strange caprices of Nature, which science leaves still
unexplained, the youngest of Mr. Vanstone's children presented no
recognizable resemblance to either of her parents. How had she come by
her hair? how had she come by her eyes? Even her father and mother had
asked themselves those questions, as she grew up to girlhood, and
had been sorely perplexed to answer them. Her hair was of that purely
light-brown hue, unmixed with flaxen, or yellow, or red--which is
oftener seen on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human being.
It was soft and plentiful, and waved downward from her low forehead
in regular folds--but, to some tastes, it was dull and dead, in its
absolute want of glossiness, in its monotonous purity of plain light
color. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were just a shade darker than her
hair, and seemed made expressly for those violet-blue eyes, which assert
their most irresistible charm when associated with a fair complexion.
But it was here exactly that the promise of her face failed of
performance in the most startling manner. The eyes, which should have
been dark, were incomprehensibly and discordantly light; they were of
that nearly colorless gray which, though little attractive in itself,
possesses the rare compensating merit of interpreting the finest
gradations of thought, the gentlest changes of feeling, the deepest
trouble of passion, with a subtle transparency of expression which no
darker eyes can rival. Thus quaintly self-contradictory in the upper
part of her face, she was hardly less at variance with established ideas
of harmony in the lower. Her lips had the true feminine delicacy of