h
nervous slow steps she approached the glass, and first brushing back the
masses of black hair from her brow, looked as for some new revelation.
Long and anxiously she perused her features: the wide bony forehead;
the eyes deep-set and rounded with the scarlet of recent tears, the thin
nose-sharp as the dead; the weak irritable mouth and sunken cheeks. She
gazed like a spirit disconnected from what she saw. Presently a sort of
forlorn negative was indicated by the motion of her head.

'I can pardon him,' she said, and sighed. 'How could he love such a
face!'

CHAPTER XXX. THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS. PART I.

At the South-western extremity of the park, with a view extending
over wide meadows and troubled mill waters, yellow barn-roofs and
weather-gray old farm-walls, two grassy mounds threw their slopes to the
margin of the stream. Here the bull-dogs held revel. The hollow between
the slopes was crowned by a bending birch, which rose three-stemmed from
the root, and hung a noiseless green shower over the basin of green it
shadowed. Beneath it the interminable growl sounded pleasantly; softly
shot the sparkle of the twisting water, and you might dream things
half-fulfilled. Knots of fern were about, but the tops of the mounds
were firm grass, evidently well rolled, and with an eye to airy feet.
Olympus one eminence was called, Parnassus the other. Olympus a little
overlooked Parnassus, but Parnassus was broader and altogether better
adapted for the games of the Muses. Round the edges of both there was a
well-trimmed bush of laurel, obscuring only the feet of the dancers from
the observing gods. For on Olympus the elders reclined. Great efforts
had occasionally been made to dispossess and unseat them, and their
security depended mainly on a hump in the middle of the mound which
defied the dance.

Watteau-like groups were already couched in the shade. There were
ladies of all sorts: town-bred and country-bred: farmers' daughters and
daughters of peers: for this pic-nic, as Lady Jocelyn, disgusting
the Countess, would call it, was in reality a 'fete champetre', given
annually, to which the fair offspring of the superior tenants were
invited the brothers and fathers coming to fetch them in the evening. It
struck the eye of the Countess de Saldar that Olympus would be a fitting
throne for her, and a point whence her shafts might fly without fear of
a return. Like another illustrious General at Salamanca, she direct