“I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon a thousand times,” he said. “You would be utterly incapable of anything that was not generous and noble. But you must remember that I had never seen you. How could I know?” “Well, now that you have seen me,” she responded, her eyes all smiles again, “now that I have put my pride in my pocket, and bearded you in your den, I don’t mind confiding in you that it’s nearly lunchtime, and also that I’m ravenously hungry. Could you ring your bell, and order up something in the nature of meat and drink? And while you are about it, you might tell your landlady or some one to pack your bag. We take,” she mentioned, examining a tiny watch, that seemed nothing more than a frivolous incrustation of little diamonds and rubies, “we take the three-sixteen for Silver Towers.” II. Seated opposite her in the railway-carriage, as their train bore them through the pleasant dales and woods of Surrey, Will Stretton fell to studying his cousin’s appearance. “Burrell was right,” he told himself; “she really is tremendously good-looking,” and that, in spite of a perfectly reckless irregularity of feature. Her nose was too small, but it was a delicate, pert, pretty nose, notwithstanding. Her mouth was too large, but it was a beautiful mouth, all the same, softly curved and red as scarlet, with sensitive, humorous little quirks in its corners. Her eyes he could admire without reservation, brown and pellucid, with the wittiest, teasingest, mockingest lights dancing in them, yet at the same time a deeper light that was pensive, tender, womanly. Her hair, too, he decided, was quite lovely, abundant, undulating, black, blue-black even, but fine, but silky, escaping in a flutter of small curls above her brow. “It’s like black foam,” he said. And he would have been ready to go to war for her complexion, though it was so un-English a complexion that one might have mistaken her for a native of the France or Italy she had inhabitated: warm, dusky white, with an elusive shadow of rose glowing through it. Yes, she was tremendously good-looking, he concluded. She looked fresh and strong and real. She looked alert, alive, full of the spring and the joy of life. She looked as if she could feel quick and deep, as if her blood flowed swiftly, and was red. He liked her face, and he liked her figure—it was supple and vigorous. He liked the way she dressed—there was something daring and spirited in the uncompromising, unabashed luxury of it. “Who ever saw such a hat—or such a sunshade?” he reflected. “There’ll be no coach-and-four to meet us at the station,” she warned him, as they neared their journey’s end, “because I have no horses. But we’ll probably find Madame Dornaye there, piaffer-ing in person. Can you resign yourself to the prospect of driving up to your ancestral mansion in a hired fly?” “I could even, at a pinch, resign myself to walking,” he declared. “But who is Madame Dornaye?”