Her face was unchanged to me. The homeliness of her large mild eyes
embraced me unshadowed, and took me to its inner fire unreservedly.
Leaning in my roomy chair, I contemplated her at leisure while my heart
kept saying 'Mine! mine!' to awaken an active belief in its possession.
Her face was like the quiet morning of a winter day when cloud and sun
intermix and make an ardent silver, with lights of blue and faint fresh
rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid
like a bending upper heaven. Those winter mornings are divine. They
move on noiselessly. The earth is still, as if awaiting. A wren
warbles, and flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens
green; elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy. They bear the veiled
sun like a sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.

She was as fair. Gazing across her shoulder's gentle depression, I could
have desired to have the couchant brow, and round cheek, and rounding
chin no more than a young man's dream of woman, a picture alive, without
the animating individual awful mind to judge of me by my acts. I chafed
at the thought that one so young and lovely should meditate on human
affairs at all. She was of an age to be maidenly romantic: our situation
favoured it. But she turned to me, and I was glad of the eyes I knew.
She kissed me on the forehead.

'Sleep,' she whispered.

I feigned sleep to catch my happiness about me.

Some disenchanting thunder was coming, I was sure, and I was right. My
father entered.