Molly O'Connell remains upon memory as beauty in a flash. Never since have I seen such a flashing combination of brilliant effects. Oh! such teeth--teeth to dream of, teeth that laughed and smiled, that had a sort of light in them like white sunshine, and were the fullest expression I have ever known of the word radiance! Then her eyes were pools of violet light, where you seemed to see straight down to the bottom of a deep well, violet all the way down to the very end, where you saw yourself reflected. These glorious eyes, like the teeth, smiled and laughed; they caressed, too, looked an unfathomable tenderness and sweetness, shone, irradiated like stars, went through the whole gamut of visual emotion, from the holiest feeling, the effable eloquence of sentiment, to the bewildering obscurities of passion. They were eyes, I now know, to damn a saint, and--Heaven help us all in a world so inexplicable as ours!--they performed their fatal mission to the bitter end. Add to these eyes and teeth hair as dark as shadow, as thick as the blackness of night, a scarlet and white face, round and dimpled, of the divinest shape, the rarest and ripest combination of fruit and flower, with deep peach-like bloom upon the soft cheek, and the hue of a crimson cherry upon the curved full lips, and there you have a woman equipped for her own destruction, if she have a heart to lose, no brains to speak of, and only as much knowledge of man, of the world, as a fresh-born kitten or a toddling babe. Molly was the joy, the light, the glory, the romance of our lives. We worshipped her for her unsurpassable loveliness, which kept rows of young eyes fixed upon her charming visage in round-lidded, wonder and awe; we adored her for her gaiety, her chatter, her incessant laughter, and we loved her for the conviction that she was as young and innocent and helpless and unlettered as ourselves. Molly was nineteen, but she was a bigger child than any of us; and now I hold my breath in pain when I remember the nature and quality of her innocence. She had been brought up from infancy in a convent. Had her life lain among the roses, such ignorance as hers might be pardoned in her teachers. But to send out into the world, to earn her living among selfish and indifferent strangers, a young girl of such bewildering exquisiteness, and never once hint to her the kind of perils that would beset her, give her no knowledge of man, nor of herself, nor of nature! This is an iniquity the nuns of Southampton can never be pardoned.