to that soft glow and glory of colour, and texture, and roundness, and life, it is possible that you might have found them to be not at all perfect; but this not one spectator in a hundred had coolness enough to do. Her eyes were hazel; they ought to have been blue, according to all rules; but it seemed part of her character, and the wilfulness which was its chief point, that she should have eyes, which, beautiful as they were, did not quite “go with” her face. There are many kinds of hazel eyes; it is the most changeful, the most capricious of colours. I have seen it turn to gold in a certain pair of orbs I wot of, showing like light itself in the light. I have seen it melt into the softest liquid grey; but there is a kind of hazel eye, very bright, very splendid, in which there is hung a subtle little danger-signal to all mankind. These are the eyes that have a spark of red in them, flashing out now and then from the warm, translucent brown, a spark which tells of temper, of passion, of headstrong will, and impulse. ’Manda Batty had these eyes. They were lamps of light, and it seemed to the looker-on, if any one remarked it at all, that this fiery gleam was necessary to give them character, and keep them from losing their due importance in the brilliant and sweet glow of colour that surrounded them. This, if it really was, as I think, an indication of danger, was the only one. At this moment her face was full of suppressed laughter. She had a finger lifted to her lip like a statue of Silence, but how unlike a statue of Silence was she otherwise! or, indeed, a statue of anything; everything about her was warm and soft, breathing a lavish life. When Frederick turned round upon her so suddenly the laughter in her face burst forth. Perhaps it was louder and more uncultivated than if she had been, as people say, a lady. She threw herself down in a chair, and laughed till the water sparkled on her pretty eyelashes, and she put her hands to her waist with such a rendering of “Laughter holding both his sides” as never entered into any painter’s imagination. “Oh,” she cried, “I shall die of laughing; come and stop me, come, papa.”