ou saw
a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and
dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.

The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's
rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl. But it
did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her
own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig. From the low
forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches;
then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming
behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the
head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders,
now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls. These
curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher--
could not have been surpassed in Bursley.

She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing
in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy
of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she
could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in
large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children
to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing
up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.' Frances Ridley
Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little
book Lean Hard, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however,
averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be
imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ.
Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her
desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything
cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to
instil this religion into others.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out
unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she
said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would
have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful
the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the
strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour
some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate
th