unreconciled thereto. Her
appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and
the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and
stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow,
and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in
her with years.

Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of black
velvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way which
added much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding her
forehead. "Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrow
band drawn over the brow," says Richter. Some of the neighbouring
girls wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallic
ornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and
metallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth was her
native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was the
daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered
there--a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician--who met his future
wife during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of good
family. The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man's wishes,
for the bandmaster's pockets were as light as his occupation. But the
musician did his best; adopted his wife's name, made England permanently
his home, took great trouble with his child's education, the expenses
of which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as the chief local
musician till her mother's death, when he left off thriving, drank, and
died also. The girl was left to the care of her grandfather, who, since
three of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck, had lived in this airy
perch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy because the house was
to be had for next to nothing, and because a remote blue tinge on
the horizon between the hills, visible from the cottage door, was
traditionally believed to be the English Channel. She hated the change;
she felt like one banished; but here she was forced to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia's brain were juxtaposed the strangest
assortment of ideas, from old time and from new. There was no middle
distance in her perspective--romantic recollections of sunny afternoons
on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around,
stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon.
Every