Three of the women into whose presence she had been so unceremoniously introduced, were seated round a table whose jagged and time-stained surface was covered with a cloth. The one who had been the instigating cause of what seemed to Edith such an entirely unprovoked assault, was a short, thick-set woman of between forty and fifty years of age. She was dressed with a cheap flashiness which served to emphasise her natural vulgarity. Her cheeks were red; her eyes were small though bold; on her upper lip was more than the suggestion of a moustache. She looked like the not too respectable wife of some disreputable small publican; a likeness which was rendered the more obvious by the accident of her having in her hand a glass which was half filled with the drink of which, plainly enough, her soul was over-fond. On her left was a tall, scraggy woman, of about the same age, clad in rusty widow's weeds. She, like her companion, wore a bonnet, but hers was an emblem of the deepest woe. Even her hands were cased in black. Anyone seeing her casually would have taken her for the widow of some struggling tradesman, who, now that she was left alone in the world, had taken, as a last resource, to letting lodgings. The expression of her face was not an agreeable one; and no judge of character, who had once had a good look at it, would willingly have accepted her as a landlady. She had high cheek-bones; hollow, sallow cheeks, as though her side teeth had departed from their places; a long, pointed nose; wide, shapeless mouth, and she kept her thin lips tightly closed. She was not the sort of woman into whose sympathetic ears one would have been disposed to pour a tale of woe. And it was surprising, when she spoke, how disagreeable her voice sounded,--as if her small, mean, rasping nature had even got the better of her vocal organs. But it was on the third person seated at the table that Edith's attention was, half unconsciously, chiefly centred. This she instinctively felt was the leading spirit present in the room, the one in whose hands her fate principally rested. The woman was of so distinct and even curious a personality that one wondered by what chance she found herself in such a gallery. She was so small as to be almost diminutive; but she was both young and pretty. One might wonder how much her fair hair, and the bloom on her cheeks, owed to artifice; but there could be no doubt as to the well-shaped mouth, the pouting lips, the dainty aquiline nose, the big bright eyes, shaded by unusually long lashes, and piquant, arched eyebrows. Yet it was in her eyes, charming though they were, that one read most clearly the storm warnings of her character. There was in them something daring, wild, relentless, suggestive of the masculine adventurer, to whom the world is an oyster, to be opened by the sharp blade of his keen wits.