in the meagre outline with most attractive details.

She stood upon the brink of the pool, and the minister
descended the steps at its edge till the soles of his shoes
were moistened with the water. He turned to the young
candidate, but she did not follow him: instead of doing so
she remained rigid as a stone. He stretched out his hand, but
she still showed reluctance, till, with some embarrassment, he
went back, and spoke softly in her ear.

She approached the edge, looked into the water, and turned
away shaking her head. Somerset could for the first time see
her face. Though humanly imperfect, as is every face we see,
it was one which made him think that the best in woman-kind no
less than the best in psalm-tunes had gone over to the
Dissenters. He had certainly seen nobody so interesting in
his tour hitherto; she was about twenty or twenty-one--perhaps
twenty-three, for years have a way of stealing marches even
upon beauty's anointed. The total dissimilarity between the
expression of her lineaments and that of the countenances
around her was not a little surprising, and was productive of
hypotheses without measure as to how she came there. She was,
in fact, emphatically a modern type of maidenhood, and she
looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a
presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones--not
wickedly so, but one who knew life fairly well for her age.
Her hair, of good English brown, neither light nor dark, was
abundant--too abundant for convenience in tying, as it seemed;
and it threw off the lamp-light in a hazy lustre. And though
it could not be said of her features that this or that was