her children, made a
looped silken canopy like the marquee at a garden-party. Her daughters
were as tall as herself--that was visible even as they sat there--and
one of them, the younger evidently, altogether pretty; a straight,
slender, grey-eyed English girl of the sort who show "good" figures and
fresh complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and
slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was not so pure, nor
were the straightness and the slenderness so maidenly. The brother of
these young ladies had taken off his hat as if he felt the air of the
summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a lean, strong,
clear-faced youth, with a formed nose and thick light-brown hair which
lay continuously and profusely back from his forehead, so that to smooth
it from the brow to the neck but a single movement of the hand was
required. I cannot describe him better than by saying that he was the
sort of young Englishman who looks particularly well in strange lands
and whose general aspect--his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the
modulation of his voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the
fashion of his garments--excites on the part of those who encounter him
in far countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful sympathy
of race. This sympathy may sometimes be qualified by the seen limits of
his apprehension, but it almost revels as such horizons recede. We shall
see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have taken of
Nicholas Dormer. There was food for suspicion perhaps in the wandering
blankness that sat at moments in his eyes, as if he had no attention at
all, not the least in the world, at his command; but it is no more than
just to add without delay that this discouraging symptom was known among
those who liked him by the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother
and sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is
the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is
always held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular
and the musing, the mildness of strength.

After some time, an interval during which these good people might have
appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de l'Industrie much
less to see the works of art than to think over their domestic affairs,
the young man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the
girls.

"I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and ta