‘I’d give a trifle,’ thought Jasper, ‘to know how many throbs to the minute the governor’s pulse is giving just now. I suppose, like a pattern guardian, he will receive her in the hall. I’ll wait till the first disjointed welcomes are over, and then drop in and inspect the new importation. I wonder if she drinks rum, like her brother?’ The captain had drawn, mentally, a fancy portrait of Hold’s sister, and had marvelled how Blanche and Lucy would be likely to get on with such a one as she could scarcely fail to be. But at the very first glance Jasper abandoned as untenable the conjecture that Miss Willis could drink rum, and he owned to himself, with the candour which men of his stamp exhibit in self-communing alone, how very wide of the mark was the likeness which his imagination had traced. Miss Willis was very short and slight, and the deep mourning which she wore made her look even slighter and shorter than she really was. She had jet black hair that curled naturally, which, as if in ignorance or defiance of fashion, she wore in a crop, and which made the whiteness of her skin seem more conspicuous than it would otherwise have done. A pale little face, lit up by a pair of fine dark eyes, that drooped modestly to the carpet, as suitable to her shy, timid air. Whether she were pretty or the reverse, was not to be so summarily settled as is the case with most of her sex. It was the eyes, and the eyes alone, that lent a marked peculiarity to the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward. Look at them, and the verdict that Miss Willis was charming would have been pronounced by many women and most men. Confine the scrutiny to the other features, and the judgment that the Indian orphan was a plain, pale little creature, would as inevitably have resulted. She looked young, quite a girl. The delicate smoothness of her cheek suggested that her age might be under twenty; but there was a subdued thoughtfulness in her aspect that might have harmonised well with her years, had she been older by a lustrum. ‘I was talking of Œdipus,’ such was Jasper’s soliloquy after a half-hour spent in the new arrival’s company; ‘but here is the Sphynx herself, by Jove!’ It was with an inexpressible sentiment of relief that the baronet saw what style of person his ward appeared to be. Here were no solecisms in breeding, no coarseness of tone, or affectations more painful than honest roughness ever is, to wince at, to gloss over, to excuse on the ground of a youth spent in a far country, and often in stations where European society was scarce, and perhaps not always choice as regarded its quality. Sir Sykes had reckoned, at best, on a probationary period during which he should have had to play the irksome part of an apologist for the shortcomings of her whom he had invited to be the companion of his own daughters.