and the reality of a
vision so unprecedented in all my experience. I therefore simply stood
like her, speechless and lost, and only came to myself when the figure
before me suddenly melted from a statue into a woman, and, with a deep
and graceful courtesy, almost daring in its abandonment, said:

"'You must be Master Felt, I take it. Master Urquhart would never be so
thrown off his balance by a simple girl like me.'

"There are voices that pierce like arrows and sink deep into the heart,
which closes over their sweetness forever. So it was with this voice.
From its first sound to its last it held me enthralled, and had she
shown but half the beauty she did, those accents of hers would have made
me her slave. As it was, I was more than her slave. I instantly became
all and everything to her. I breathed but as she breathed, and in the
absorbing delight which from that moment took hold of me I lost all
sense of the proprieties and conventionalities of social intercourse,
and only thought of drinking in at one draught the strange and
mysterious loveliness which I saw revealed before me.

"She was not a tall woman, no taller than Miss Dudleigh. Nor was she of
marked carriage or build. Her form, indeed, seemed only made to express
suppleness and passion, and was as speaking in its slight proportions as
if it had breathed forth the nobler attributes of majesty and strength.
Her dress was dark, and clung to every curve with a loving persistence
bewildering in its effect upon an eye like mine. Upon the bust, and just
below the white throat, burned a mass of gorgeous flowers as ruddy as
wine; and from one delicate hand a long vine trailed to the floor. But
it was in her face that her power lay; in her eyes possibly, though I
scarcely think so, for there were curves to her lips such as I have
never seen in any other, and a delicate turn to her nostril that at
times made me feel as if she were breathing fire. Her skin was pale, her
forehead broad and low, her nose straight, and her lips of a brilliant
vermilion. I, however, saw only her eyes, though I may have been
influenced by the rest of her bewildering physiognomy; they were so
large, so changeful, so full of alternating flames and languor, so
indeterminate in color, and yet so persistent in their effect upon the
eye and the feelings. Looking at them, I swore she was an anomaly.
Gazing into them, I resolved that she was this only because she let
herself be natural and sought