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lock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the rough freshness of the breeze. The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of strength--not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight, but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity--seemed to mark her out as something different from the herd. Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the lonely moor. Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the rest--black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the reception of new impressions. For, of course, it was Leam--Leam, who, since her return from school, alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor cried, nor quarreled nor made up--neither stood as a model of fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future inconstancies--writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow--but had kept with all the same quiet gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share, and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win. All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself,
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