also which is exclusively feminine. Her complexion was capricious; now
pale, now tinged with the pink of the sea-shell, or the softest shade of
the rose leaf: but in either it was so transparent, that you doubted which
became her the most. To these attractions, add a throat, a bust of the
most dazzling whiteness, and the justest proportions; a foot, whose least
beauty was its smallness, and a waist narrow--not the narrowness of
tenuity or constraint;--but round, gradual, insensibly less in its
compression:--and the person of Constance Vernon, in the bloom of her
youth, is before you.

She passed with her quiet and stately step from her room, through one
adjoining it, and which we stop to notice, because it was her customary
sitting-room when not with Lady Erpingham. There had Godolphin, with the
foreign but courtly freedom, the respectful and chivalric ease of his
manners, often sought her; there had he lingered in order to detain her
yet a moment and a moment longer from other company, seeking a sweet
excuse in some remark on the books that strewed the tables, or the music
in that recess, or the forest scene from those windows through which the
moon of autumn now stole with its own peculiar power to soften and subdue.
As these recollections came across her, her step faltered and her colour
faded from its glow: she paused a moment, cast a mournful glance round the
room, and then tore herself away, descended the lofty staircase, passed
the stone hall, melancholy with old banners and rusted crests, and bore
her beauty and her busy heart into the thickening and gay crowd.

Her eye looked once more round for the graceful form of Godolphin: but he
was not visible; and she had scarcely satisfied herself of this before
Lord Erpingham, the hero of the evening, approached and claimed her hand.

"I have just performed my duty," said he, with a gallantry of speech not