her face. We can see it
fully, for her bonnet lies beside her on the rock.

The masque, though thin, is perfect. The brow, like that of Greek
statue, looks lower than it really is, for the hair springs from below
the bend of the forehead. The brain is very long, and sweeps backward
and upward in grand curves, till it attains above the ears a great
expanse and height. She should be a character more able to feel
than to argue; full of all a woman's veneration, devotion, love of
children,--perhaps, too, of a woman's anxiety.

The nose is slightly aquiline; the sharp-cut nostrils indicate a
reserve of compressed strength and passion; the mouth is delicate;
the lips, which are full and somewhat heavy, not from coarseness, but
rather from languor, show somewhat of both the upper and the under
teeth. Her eyes are bent on the pool at her feet; so that we can see
nothing of them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long
and dark that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern
fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair,
crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase
the almost ghostlike paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white,
but of a clear, bloodless, waxen hue.

And now she lifts her eyes,--dark eyes, of preternatural largeness;
brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond; brilliant as
deep clear wells are, in which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathom-deep
between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the wide-opened
lips, and arching eyebrow, and slightly wrinkled forehead, hangs an
air of melancholy thought, vague doubt, almost of startled fear; then
that expression passes, and the whole face collapses into a languor of
patient sadness, which seems to say,--"I cannot solve the mystery. Let
Him solve it as seems good to Him."

The pier has, as usual, two stages; the upper and narrower for a
public promenade, the lower and broader one for business. Two rough
collier-lads, strangers to the place, are lounging on the wall above,
and begin, out of mere mischief, dropping pebbles on the group below.

"Hillo! you young rascals," calls an old man lounging like them on
the wall; "if you don't drop that, you're likely to get your heads
broken."

"Will you do it?"

"I would thirty years ago; but I'll find a dozen in five minutes who
will do it now. Here, lads! here's two Welsh vagabonds pelting our
schoolmistress."

This is