said, "still remains involved in its own appropriate
midnight darkness. I have been all the
morning looking over my mother's letters; and
I have made no discoveries yet. However, don't
despair, Mr. Hartright. This is a matter of
curiosity; and you have got a woman for your
ally. Under such conditions, success is certain,
sooner or later. The letters are not exhausted.
I have three packets still left, and you may
confidently rely on my spending the whole evening
over them."

Here, then, was one of my anticipations of
the morning still unfulfilled. I began to wonder,
next, whether my introduction to Miss Fairlie
would disappoint the expectations that I had
been forming of her since breakfast-time.

"And how did you get on with my uncle?"
inquired Miss Halcombe, as we left the lawn
and turned into a shrubbery. "Was he
particularly nervous this morning? Never mind
considering about your answer, Mr. Hartright.
The mere fact of your being obliged to consider
is enough for me. I see in your face that he
was particularly nervous; and, as I am amiably
unwilling to throw you into the same condition,
I ask no more."

We turned off into a winding path while she
was speaking, and approached a pretty summer-
house, built of wood, in the form of a miniature
Swiss chalet. The one room of the summer-
house, as we ascended the steps at the door, was
occupied by a young lady. She was standing
near a rustic table, looking out at the inland
view of moor and hill presented by a gap in the
trees, and absently turning over the leaves of a
little sketch-book that lay at her side. This was
Miss Fairlie.

How can I describe her? How can I separate
her from my own sensations, and from all
that has happened in the later time? How can
I see her again as she looked when my eyes first
rested on her—as she should look, now, to the
eyes that are about to see her in these pages?

The water-colour drawing that I made of Laura
Fairlie, at an after period, in the place and attitude
in which I first saw her, lies on my desk
while I write. I look at it, and there dawns
upon me brightly, from the dark greenish-brown
background of the summer-house, a light, youthful
figure, clothed in a simple muslin dress, the
pattern of it formed by broad alternate stripes
of delicate blue and white. A scarf of the same
material sits crisply and closely round her
shoulders, and a little straw hat, of the natural
colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed with ribbon
to match the gown, covers her head, and throws
its soft pearly shadow over the upper part of her
face. Her hair is of so faint and pale a brown
—not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden,
and yet almost as glossy—that it nearly melts,
here and there, into the shadow of the hat. It
is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears,
and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses
her forehead. The eyebrows are rather darker
than the hair; and the eyes are of that soft,
limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the
poets, so seldom seen in real life. Lovely eyes
in colour, lovely eyes in form—large and tender
and quietly thoughtful—but beautiful above all
things in the clear truthfulness of look that
dwells in their inmost depths, and shines through
all their changes of expression with the light of
a purer and a better world. The charm—most
gently and yet most distinctly expressed—which
they shed over the whole face, so covers and
transforms its little natural human blemishes
elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the
relative merits and defects of the other features.
It is hard to see that the lower part of the face
is too delicately refined away towards the chin
to be in full and fair proportion with the upper
part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline
bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no
matter how abstractedly perfect it may be), has
erred a little in the other extreme, and has
missed the ideal straightness of line; and that
the sweet, sensitive lips are subject to a slight
nervous contraction, when she smiles, which
draws them upward a little at one corner,
towards the cheek. It might be possible to note
these blemishes in another woman's face, but it
is not easy to dwell on them in hers, so subtly
are they connected with all that is individual
and characteristic in her expression, and so
closely does the expression depend for its full
play and life, in every other feature, on the
moving impulse of the eyes.

Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient
labour of long and happy days, show me these
things? Ah, how few of them are in the dim
mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind
with which I regard it! A fair, delicate girl, in
a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a
sketch-book, while she looks up from it with
truthful innocent blue eyes—that is all the
drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the
deeper reach of thought and pen can say in
their language, either. The woman who first
gives life, light, and form to our shadowy
conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual
nature that has remained unknown to us till she
appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for
words, too deep almost for thoughts, are
touched, at such times, by other charms than
those which the senses feel and which the
resources of expression can realise. The mystery
which underlies the beauty of women is never
raised above the reach of all expression until it
has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in
our own souls. Then, and then only, has it
passed beyond the narrow region on which light
falls, in this world, from the pencil and the
pen.

Think of her, as you thought of the first
woman who quickened the pulses within you
that the rest of her sex had no art to stir.
Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as
they met mine, with the one matchless look
which we both remember so well. Let her voice
speak the music that you once loved best,
attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let
her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these
pages, be like that other footstep to whose airy
fall your own heart once beat time. Take her