“It was on the anniversary of their birth—the day they attained their twenty-first year—that the brothers again met upon their own hearth-stone. Mrs. Darsie’s health had begun to fail, and Edgar, at Herbert’s suggestion, had unwillingly torn himself from the enjoyments of Parisian life to return to his quiet home. He found his mother sadly changed, and evidently suffering from the insidious disease which so slowly saps the foundations of health and life. Herbert, like all deformed persons, had early lost the freshness of youth, and he was not surprised, therefore, to find him looking at least ten years older than himself, but he was astonished at the intellectual beauty which seemed to radiate from his noble countenance. To the shapeless form of a stunted tree he united the head of a demi-god. The beauty of his classical features, the splendor of his deep, dark eyes, and rich glossy hair curling in heavy masses round his temples, gave him the appearance of a magnificently sculptured head joined on to some distorted torso. “But if Edgar was startled at the change in his mother and brother, how was he amazed and bewildered when he saw Jesse Graham! The pale, puny, frightened-looking little girl had expanded into one of the very loveliest of women. At eighteen Jessie had all that delicate yet fresh beauty which a painter would select as his model for a youthful Hebe. “A rose crushed upon ivory” was not too extravagant a simile for her cheek; her lips were like the berry of the mountain-ash; and her eyes so soft, so tender, with just enough of their former shyness to make them always seem appealing in their expression, were like nothing else on earth.” “You are extravagant, Uncle Lorimer; pray how did you avoid falling in love with such a creature?” asked Anne, saucily.