distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome mouth
into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not to
affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that
set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the
secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings
of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the woman
to be rather by natural temperament passionate and impulsive than
systematically cruel or deliberately-false,--false or cruel only as some
predominating passion became the soul's absolute tyrant, and adopted the
tyrant's vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty
that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was
written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall,
which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek
human animal before her.

In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On
the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe
literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,--the
stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by
boarding-schools from Tasso, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors,
Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary
works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos,
if not into their penetralia,--botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim as
soldiers on parade stood the books,--not a gap in their ranks,--evidently
never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet faded, dusty; relics
of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have been prizes at school,
or birthday gifts from proud relations. There, too, on the table, near
the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,--no silks now on the
skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished
silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-