third was Albert Durer's St. Jerome. This latter was an heirloom, and
greatly prized I could perceive, as it was hung in the place of honour
over the mantelpiece.

After some little introductory talk, the same girl whom I had noticed
with Mardon at the chapel came in, and I was introduced to her as his
only daughter Mary. She began to busy herself at once in getting the
tea. She was under the average height for a woman, and delicately
built. Her head was small, but the neck was long. Her hair was brown,
of a peculiarly lustrous tint, partly due to nature, but also to a
looseness of arrangement and a most diligent use of the brush, so that
the light fell not upon a dead compact mass, but upon myriads of
individual hairs, each of which reflected the light. Her eyes, so far
as I could make out, were a kind of greenish grey, but the eyelashes
were long, so that it was difficult exactly to discover what was
underneath them. The hands were small, and the whole figure
exquisitely graceful; the plain black dress, which she wore fastened
right up to the throat, suiting her to perfection. Her face, as I
first thought, did not seem indicative of strength. The lips were
thin, but not straight, the upper lip showing a remarkable curve in it.
Nor was it a handsome face. The complexion was not sufficiently
transparent, nor were the features regular.

During tea she spoke very little, but I noticed one peculiarity about
her manner of talking, and that was its perfect simplicity. There was
no sort of effort or strain in anything she said, no attempt by
emphasis of words to make up for the weakness of thought, and no
compliance with that vulgar and most disagreeable habit of using
intense language to describe what is not intense in itself. Her yea
was yea, and her no, no. I observed also that she spoke without