to stir. Let the kind,
candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless
look which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak the music
that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine.
Let her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that
other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take
her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon
you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine.

Among the sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first looked upon
her--familiar sensations which we all know, which spring to life in
most of our hearts, die again in so many, and renew their bright
existence in so few--there was one that troubled and perplexed me: one
that seemed strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place in
Miss Fairlie's presence.

Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair
face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning simplicity of
manner, was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to
me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something
wanting in HER: at another, like something wanting in myself, which
hindered me from understanding her as I ought. The impression was
always strongest in the most contradictory manner, when she looked at
me; or, in other words, when I was most conscious of the harmony and
charm of her face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by the
sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover.
Something wanting, something wanting--and where it was, and what it
was, I could not say.

The effect of this curious caprice of fancy (as I thought it then) was
not of a nature to set me at my ease, during a first interview with
Miss Fairlie. The few kind words of welcome which she spoke found me
hardly self-possessed enough to thank her in the customary phrases of
reply. Observing my hesitation, and no doubt attributing it, naturally
enough, to some momentary shyness on my part, Miss Halcombe took the
business of talking, as easily and readily as usual, into her own hands.

"Look there, Mr. Hartright," she said, pointing to the sketch-book on
the table, and to the little delicate wandering hand that was still
trifling with it. "Surely you will acknowledge that your model pupil
is found at last? The moment she hears that you are in the house, she
seizes her inestimable sketch-b