gesting
both. This, however, was mere superficiality. In respect of
character a face may make certain admissions by its outline; but
it fully confesses only in its changes. So much is this the case
that what is called the play of the features often helps more in
understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of all the other
members together. Thus the night revealed little of her whose form it
was embracing, for the mobile parts of her countenance could not be
seen.

At last she gave up her spying attitude, closed the telescope, and
turned to the decaying embers. From these no appreciable beams now
radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over
their faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the
blush of a girl. She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting
from the brands a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at
its end, brought it to where she had been standing before.

She held the brand to the ground, blowing the red coal with her mouth
at the same time; till it faintly illuminated the sod, and revealed
a small object, which turned out to be an hourglass, though she wore
a watch. She blew long enough to show that the sand had all slipped
through.

"Ah!" she said, as if surprised.

The light raised by her breath had been very fitful, and a momentary
irradiation of flesh was all that it had disclosed of her face. That
consisted of two matchless lips and a cheek only, her head being still
enveloped. She threw away the stick, took the glass in her hand, the
telescope under her arm, and moved on.

Along the ridge ran a faint foot-track, which the lady followed.
Those who knew it well called it a path; and, while a mere visitor
would have passed it unnoticed even by day, the regular haunters of
the heath were at no loss for it at midnight. The whole secret of
following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in
the atmosphere to show a turnpike-road, lay in the development of the
sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling
in little-trodden spots. To a walker practised in such places a
difference between impact on maiden herbage, and on the crippled
stalks of a slight footway, is perceptible through the thickest boot
or shoe.

The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy
tune still played on the dead heath-bells. She did not turn her head
to look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled