The dining-room was only an old-fashioned oak-panelled chamber, like the drawing-room; but the hands which had beautified the one had imparted the same air of grace and refinement to the other. There were more pictures and books and china, more fresh flowers in vases of dark-blue Wedgwood: and, above all, there was that sweet home-like aspect, which has a deeper charm than is to be imparted by the choicest treasures of art or the fairest gifts of nature. A small round table was laid for supper; and the bright colouring of a lobster, the tender green of a salad, the varied hues of some fruit piled high in a basket-shaped china dish, to say nothing of all the glitter and sparkle of rare old-fashioned glass and silver, or the amber and ruby of wines, made no uninviting picture under the mellow light of the lamp. But there was a fairer picture to be seen in that chamber, which distracted the stranger’s gaze from the hospitable preparations that had been made for him--the picture of a girl standing by a ponderous old easy-chair, with her white hands loosely folded on the cushion, and with the great black Newfoundland dog at her feet. In the course of his eventless life Eustace Thorburn had not seen many beautiful women, so it is a small thing to say that the girl he saw to-night seemed to him the loveliest creature he had ever beheld. The dark beauties of Villebrumeuse, rich in the southern graces of their Spanish ancestors, had flashed their black eyes upon the young Englishman sometimes, as he paced the quiet streets of their city, but had gone by unnoticed by him. It may have been that to-night his imagination was unusually exalted, his mind peculiarly prone to receive impressions, for it seemed to him as if he had passed out of the dull, beaten tracks of every-day life into an enchanted region, a kind of Arcadian fairy-land, of which this beauteous creature was a fitting queen. She was an honest English beauty, and the brightness of her complexion had ripened under an English sun. Her dark-blue eyes seemed darker and bluer by reason of the rosy bloom of her cheeks and the crimson of her perfect mouth. The dusky gold of her hair was no fictitious charm derived from the costly washes of a court perfumer. She was no spurious Venetian beauty, with locks of tawny red; but a fair English girl, fresh and bright as a woodland summer morning, pure as a flower with the dew upon its opening petals. Her white muslin dress was unrelieved by a trinket or a ribbon; but what need had she of colour or jewels, whose eyes were more brilliant than the rarest sapphires, whose lips were more precious than Neapolitan coral, and in whose innocent young beauty there was a brightness surpassing the radiance of earthly gems?