She was a tall young girl of about twenty-two or three, holding
herself erect and with fine dignity. Even beneath the opera cloak it
was easy to infer that her neck and shoulders were beautiful. Her
almost extreme slenderness was, however, her characteristic; the
curves of her figure, the contour of her shoulders, the swell of hip
and breast were all low; from head to foot one could discover no
pronounced salience. Yet there was no trace, no suggestion of
angularity. She was slender as a willow shoot is slender--and
equally graceful, equally erect.

Next to this charming tenuity, perhaps her paleness was her most
noticeable trait. But it was not a paleness of lack of colour. Laura
Dearborn's pallour was in itself a colour. It was a tint rather than
a shade, like ivory; a warm white, blending into an exquisite,
delicate brownness towards the throat. Set in the middle of this
paleness of brow and cheek, her deep brown eyes glowed lambent and
intense. They were not large, but in some indefinable way they were
important. It was very natural to speak of her eyes, and in speaking
to her, her friends always found that they must look squarely into
their pupils. And all this beauty of pallid face and brown eyes was
crowned by, and sharply contrasted with, the intense blackness of
her hair, abundant, thick, extremely heavy, continually coruscating
with sombre, murky reflections, tragic, in a sense vaguely
portentous,--the coiffure of a heroine of romance, doomed to dark
crises.

On this occasion at the side of the topmost coil, a white aigrette
scintillated and trembled with her every movement. She was
unquestionably beautiful. Her mouth was a little large, the lips