She was very tall; her figure magnificently developed, though slender-waisted and lithe as a serpent. She walked as if she had been bred in a _basquina_, and her foot and ankle were hardly to be matched on this side of the Pyrenees; the nose slightly aquiline, with thin, transparent nostrils; and the forehead rather low--it looked more so, perhaps, from the thick masses of dark hair which framed and shaded her face. Under the clear, pale olive of the cheeks the rich blood mantled now and then like wine in a Venice glass; and her lips--the outline of the upper one just defined by a penciling of down, the lower one full and pouting--glistened with the brilliant smoothness of a pomegranate flower when the dew is clinging. Her eyes--the opium-eaters of Stamboul never dreamed of their peers among the bevies of hachis-houris. They were of the very darkest hazel; one moment sleeping lazily under their long lashes, like a river under leaves of water-lilies; the next, sparkling like the same stream when the sunlight is splintered on its ripples into carcanets of diamonds. When they chose to speak, not all the orators that have rounded periods since Isocrates could match their eloquence; when it was their will to guard a secret, they met you with the cold, impenetrable gaze that we attribute to the mighty mother, Cybele. Even a philosopher might have been interested--on purely psychological grounds, of course--in watching the thoughts as they rose one by one to the surface of those deep, clear wells (was truth at the bottom of them?--I doubt), like the strange shapes of beauty that reveal themselves to seamen, coyly and slowly, through the purple calm of the Indian Sea. Twice I have chosen a watery simile; but I know no other element combining, as her glances did, liquid softness with lustre. When near her, you were sensible of a strange, subtle, intoxicating perfume, very fragrant, perfectly indefinable, which clung, not only to her dress, but to every thing belonging to her. From what flowers it was distilled no artist in essences alive could have told. I incline to think that, like the "birk" in the ghost's garland, "They were not grown on earthly bank, Nor yet on earthly sheugh." Guy took Miss Bellasys in to dinner, and I found myself placed on her other side. I had been introduced to her ten minutes before, but had little opportunity for "improving the occasion," as the Nonconformists have it, for she never once deigned a look in my direction. My right-hand neighbor was an elderly man of a full habit, whom it would have been cruel to disturb till the rage of hunger was appeased, so I was fain to seek amusement in the conversation going on on my left. There was no indiscretion in this, for I knew Guy would never touch secrets of state in mixed company.