been surprised at any incongruity in the brief passing of that illusion.

The sensation flashed up and vanished; but it left me with the excited
feeling of one who has had a vision of something transcendental, something
more vivid and real than the common experiences of life--just such a
feeling as I have had about some perfectly absurd dream of the night.

* * * * *

Mr. Jervaise was a man of nearly sixty, I suppose, with a clean-shaven
face, a longish nose, and rather loose cheeks which fell, nevertheless,
into firm folds and gave him a look of weak determination. I should have
liked to model his face in clay; his lines were of the kind that give the
amateur a splendid chance in modelling.

Mrs. Jervaise was taller and thinner than her husband, but lost something
by always carrying her head with a slight droop as if she were for ever
passing through a low doorway. Her features were sharper than his--she had
a high hawk nose and a thin line of a mouth--but either they were
carelessly arranged or their relative proportions were bad, for I never
felt the least desire to model her. Jervaise's face came out as a
presentable whole, my memory of his wife delivers the hawk nose as the one
salient object of what is otherwise a mere jumble.

Old Jervaise certainly looked the more aristocratic of the pair, but Mrs.
Jervaise was a woman of good family. She had been a Miss Norman before her
marriage--one of the Shropshire Normans.

* * * * *