y of the rattling heavens and swaying
forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a
soul at holiday. Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and
reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within,
issues to all the outer Edens. Few of us possess that double significance
of the pure sparkle. It captivated Lady Grace. She said a word of it to
Fenellan: 'There is a man who can feel rapture!' He had not to follow the
line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening, in a similar tone;
and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very emphasis, was quaint.
She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs were in motion to
designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the instinct to be
dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and delighted in its
effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle of eyes did an
idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being surpassed; and
it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to express. Such a
reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally sensible that they
are the feminine of him.

'His girl has the look,' Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
father's vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child. The mother gave
richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
qualities, moral if you like. But vividness was Lady Grace's admirable
meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
value of obscurer lights. Under the charm of Nataly's rich contralto
during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations, they
would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology for
language, beside Victor's gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of the
notes.

Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
next day.

Her anxieties were at once running about to gat