was an hour later than usual, but Mysie was quite unaware of
that: she had been absorbed in her book, too much absorbed even to ring
for better light than the fire afforded. When her father went to put off
his long, bifurcated greatcoat, she returned to her seat by the fire,
and forgot to make the tea. It was a warm, snug room, full of dark,
old-fashioned, spider-legged furniture; low-pitched, with a bay-window,
open like an ear to the cries of the German Ocean at night, and like an
eye during the day to look out upon its wide expanse. This ear or eye
was now curtained with dark crimson, and the room, in the firelight,
with the young girl for a soul to it, affected one like an ancient book
in which he reads his own latest thought.

Mysie was nothing over the middle height--delicately-fashioned, at once
slender and round, with extremities neat as buds. Her complexion was
fair, and her face pale, except when a flush, like that of a white rose,
overspread it. Her cheek was lovelily curved, and her face rather short.
But at first one could see nothing for her eyes. They were the largest
eyes; and their motion reminded one of those of Sordello in the
Purgatorio:

E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda:

they seemed too large to move otherwise than with a slow turning like
that of the heavens. At first they looked black, but if one ventured
inquiry, which was as dangerous as to gaze from the battlements of
Elsinore, he found them a not very dark brown. In her face, however,
especially when flushed, they had all the effect of what Milton
describes as

Quel sereno fulgor d'amabil nero.

A wise observer would have been a little troubled in regarding her
mouth. The sadness of a morbid sensibility hovered about it--the sign
of an imagination wrought upon from the centre of self. Her lips were
neither thin nor compressed--they closed lightly, and were richly
curved; but there was a mobility almost tremulous about the upper lip
that gave sign of the possibility of such an oscillation of feeling as
might cause the whole fabric of her nature to rock dangerously.

The moment her father re-entered, she started from her stool on the rug,
and proceeded to make the tea. Her father took no notice of her neglect,
but drew a chair to the table, helped himself to a piece of oat-cake,
hastily loaded it with as much butter as it could well carry, and while
eating it forgot it and everything else in the absorption of a volume he