"the woman in white? or the unknown
inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?"  It
was a strange sensation to be sleeping in the
house, like a friend of the family, and yet not to
know one of the inmates, even by sight!

v.

WHEN I rose the next morning and drew up
my blind, the sea opened before me joyously
under the broad August sunlight, and the
distant coast of Scotland fringed the horizon with
its lines of melting blue.

The view was such a surprise, and such a
change to me, after my weary London
experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I
seemed to burst into a new life and a new set
of thoughts the moment I looked at it. A
confused sensation of having suddenly lost my
familiarity with the past, without acquiring
any additional clearness of idea in reference to
the present or the future, took possession of my
mind. Circumstances that were but a few days
old, faded back in my memory, as if they had
happened months and months since. Pesca's
quaint announcement of the means by which he
had procured me my present employment; the
farewell evening I had passed with my mother
and sister; even my mysterious adventure on
the way home from Hampstead, had all become
like events which might have occurred at some
former epoch of my existence. Although the
woman in white was still in my mind, the image of
her seemed to have grown dull and faint already.

A little before nine o'clock, I descended to
the ground-floor of the house. The solemn man-
servant of the night before met me wandering
among the passages, and compassionately showed
me the way to the breakfast-room.

My first glance round me, as the man opened
the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-
table, standing in the middle of a long room,
with many windows in it. I looked from the
table to the window farthest from me, and saw
a lady standing at it, with her back turned
towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her,
I was struck by the rare beauty of her form,
and by the unaffected grace of her attitude.
Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely
and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on
her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her
waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it
occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural
circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed
by stays. She had not heard my entrance into
the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of
admiring her for a few moments, before I moved
one of the chairs near me, as the least embarassing
means of attracting her attention. She
turned towards me immediately. The easy
elegance of every movement of her limbs and body
as soon as she began to advance from the far end
of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation
to see her face clearly. She left the window—
and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She
moved forward a few steps—and I said to
myself, The lady is young. She approached
nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of
surprise which words fail me to express), The
lady is ugly!

Never was the old conventional maxim, that
Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted—
never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more
strangely and startlingly belied by the face and
head that crowned it. The lady's complexion
was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her
upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a
large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent,
piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick,
coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on
her forehead. Her expression—bright, frank,
and intelligent, appeared—while she was silent,
to be altogether wanting in those feminine
attractions of gentleness and pliability, without
which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive
is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as
this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have
longed to model—to be charmed by the modest
graces of action through which the symmetrical
limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved,
and then to be almost repelled by the
masculine form and masculine look of the features
in which the perfectly shaped figure ended—
was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the
helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when
we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies
and contradictions of a dream.

"Mr. Hartright?" said the lady, interrogatively;
her dark face lighting up with a smile,
and softening and growing womanly the moment
she began to speak. "We resigned all hope of
you last night, and went to bed as usual.
Accept my apologies for our apparent want of
attention; and allow me to introduce myself as
one of your pupils. Shall we shake hands?
I suppose we must come to it sooner or later—
and why not sooner?"

These odd words of welcome were spoken in
a clear, ringing, pleasant voice. The offered
hand—rather large, but beautifully formed—
was given to me with the easy, unaffected self-
reliance of a highly-bred woman. We sat
down together at the breakfast-table in as
cordial and customary a manner as if we had known
each other for years, and had met at Limmeridge
House to talk over old times by previous
appointment.

"I hope you come here good-humouredly
determined to make the best of your position,"
continued the lady.  "You will have to begin
this morning by putting up with no other
company at breakfast than mine. My sister
is in her own room, nursing that essentially
feminine malady, a slight headache; and her old
governess, Mrs. Vesey, is charitably attending
on her with restorative tea. My uncle, Mr.
Fairlie, never joins us at any of our meals: he
is an invalid, and keeps bachelor state in his own
apartments. There is nobody else in the house
but me. Two young ladies have been staying
here, but they went away yesterday, in despair;
and no wonder.  All through their visit (in
consequence of Mr. Fairlie's invalid condition) we
produced no such convenience in the house as a
flirtable, danceable, small-talkable creature of