The striking beauty of Belle, especially that of her blue eyes and flaxen hair, and the impressiveness of her demeanour, calm and proud, which compelled the similitude to a serious and queenly heroine, such as 'Queen Theresa of Hungary, or Brynhilda, the Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd, the serpent-killer,' is emphasised by the contrast drawn between her and the handsome brunette Mrs. Petulengro, who is for the nonce subjugated by Isopel's beauty, and craves the privilege of acting as her tire-woman. Alas, as is so often the case in life, Lavengro and the reader are only just beginning to realise the beauty and the value of the "bellissima," as the man in black calls her, when she is on the point of sinking beneath our horizon, passing away like the brief music of an aubade. Rapidly, much too rapidly, do we approach that summer dawn when Belle, dressed neatly and plainly, her hair no longer plaited in Romany fashion or floating in the wind, but secured by a comb, uncovered no longer, but wearing a bonnet, her features very pale, allowed her cold hand to be wrung--it was for the last time--by the unconscious Rye. The latter ascended to the plain and thence looked down towards the dingle. "Isopel Berners stood at the mouth, the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hands towards her, she slowly lifted up her right arm; I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again." Hardly less forlorn is the reader than the philologist when the latter arrives back at the dingle, after a visit to the tavern two miles away, to find that the tardily recognised treasure is lost to him for ever,--resolved at length, too late, to give over teasing Belle by pretending to teach her Armenian, determined, when the need is past, to regularise his "uncertificated" relations with the glorious damozel, and resigned, when concession is fruitless, to sink those objections to America which Belle had disavowed, but which he had been proud to share with disbanded soldiers, sextons, and excisemen. To this decision his tortuous conferences with Jasper, and his frank soliloquy in the dingle, had bent him fully forty-eight hours before Belle's ultimate departure, unwilling though he was to incur the yoke of matrimony.