While he was speaking, Clinton followed the beckoning motion of his hand, and approached the bridge. It is impossible to describe the ease and grace of his motions, or the wild charm imparted to his countenance by the long, dark, shining, back-flowing locks, that softened their haughty outline. His hair, eye-lashes and eye-brows were of deep, raven black, but his eyes were a dark blue, a union singularly striking, and productive of wonderful expression. As he came nearer and nearer, and Mittie felt those dark blue, black shaded eyes riveted on her face, with a look of unmistakable admiration, she remembered the words of her brother, and the consciousness of beauty, for the first time, gave her a sensation of pride and pleasure. She was too proud to be vain--and what cared she for gifts, destined, like pearls, to be cast before an unvaluing herd? The young doctor was the only young man whose admiration she had ever thought worthy to secure, and having met from him only cold politeness, she had lately felt for him only bitterness and dislike. Living as she had done in a kind of cold abstraction, enjoying only the pleasures of intellect, in all the sufficiency of self, it was a matter of indifference to her what people thought of her. She felt so infinitely above them, looking down like the aeronaut, from a colder, more rarefied atmosphere, upon objects lessened to meanness by her own elevation. She could never look down on such a being as Bryant Clinton. Her first thought was--"Will he dare to look down on me?" There was so much pride, tempered by courtesy, such an air of lofty breeding, softened by grace, so much intellectual power and sleeping passion in his face, that she felt the contact of a strong, controlling spirit, a will to which her own might be constrained to bow.