Sir Joseph's maiden sister.
Personally, Sir Joseph in petticoats. If you knew one you knew the
other.
Thirdly, Miss Natalie Graybrooke--Sir Joseph's only child.
She had inherited the personal appearance and the temperament of her
mother--dead many years since. There had been a mixture of Negro
blood and French blood in the late Lady Graybrooke's family, settled
originally in Martinique. Natalie had her mother's warm dusky color, her
mother's superb black hair, and her mother's melting, lazy, lovely
brown eyes. At fifteen years of age (dating from her last birthday) she
possessed the development of the bosom and limbs which in England is
rarely attained before twenty. Everything about the girl--except her
little rosy ears--was on a grand Amazonian scale. Her shapely hand was
long and large; her supple waist was the waist of a woman. The indolent
grace of all her movements had its motive power in an almost masculine
firmness of action and profusion of physical resource. This remarkable
bodily development was far from being accompanied by any corresponding
development of character. Natalie's manner was the gentle, innocent
manner of a young girl. She had her father's sweet temper ingrafted on
her mother's variable Southern nature. She moved like a goddess, and she
laughed like a child. Signs of maturing too rapidly--of outgrowing her
strength, as the phrase went--had made their appearance in Sir
Joseph's daughter during the spring. The family doctor had suggested
a sea-voyage, as a wise manner of employing the fine summer months.
Richard Turlington's yacht was placed at her disposal, with Richard
Turlington himself included as one of the fixtures of the vessel.
With her father and her aunt to keep up round her the atmosphere of
home--with Cousin Launcelot (more commonly known as "Launce") to
carry out, if necessary, the medical treatment prescribed by superior
authority on shore--the lovely invalid embarked on her summer cruise,
and sprang up into a new existence in the life-giving breezes of
the sea. After two happy months of lazy coasting round the shores of
England, all that remained of Natalie's illness was represented by a
delicious languor in her eyes, and an utter inability to devote herself
to anything which took the shape of a serious occupation. As she sat
at the cabin breakfast-table that morning, in her quaintly-made sailing
dress of old-fashioned nankeen--her inbred childishness of manner
contrasting delig
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