r; it was not necessary to look
further: there she lived.

These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance--blue as the blue we see
between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny
September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or
surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.

As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women can
make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting
hall; Elfride's was no more pervasive than that of a kitten.

Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of
the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit
of the type of woman's feature most common to the beauties--mortal
and immortal--of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness. The
characteristic expression of the female faces of Correggio--that of the
yearning human thoughts that lie too deep for tears--was hers sometimes,
but seldom under ordinary conditions.

The point in Elfride Swancourt's life at which a deeper current may be
said to have permanently set in, was one winter afternoon when she found
herself standing, in the character of hostess, face to face with a man
she had never seen before--moreover, looking at him with a Miranda-like
curiosity and interest that she had never yet bestowed on a mortal.

On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the
sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering from
an attack of gout. After finishing her household supervisions Elfride
became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the
staircase, and knocked at her father's chamber-door.

'Come in!' was always answered in a hearty out-of-door voice from the
inside.

'Papa,' she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man of
forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the bed
wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then enunciating, in spite
of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were almost
oaths; 'papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?' She spoke
distinctly: he was rather deaf.

'Afraid not--eh-hh!--very much afraid I shall not, Elfride. Piph-ph-ph!
I can't bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe of mine, much less
a stocking or slipper--piph-ph-ph! There 'tis again! No, I shan't get up
till to-morrow.'

'Then I hope this London man won't come; for I don't know what I should
do, papa.'

'Well, it would be