Though Margot was lovely, Gabrielle was lovelier. They differed in beauty as pompadour-pink differs from brier-rose. Margot’s was a golden beauty; Gabrielle’s an ivory loveliness. Margot was a pottery figurine moulded with marvelous skill; Gabrielle a statuette of exquisite porcelain. Margot was like the summer sun, dazzling, opulent, sumptuous; Gabrielle like the young spring moon in her slender loveliness; the lines of her flowed one into the other like the lines of a song. Her hands were delicate and fine, their touch as light as flowers blown by the wind, which drift like a whisper across the face of the passer-by. Her feet were arched like a Spanish girl’s; her ankles were the loveliest things that ever sandal-ribbon bound; she walked like the wind of an April morning through meadows after rain. Her face, with its delicate high cheek-bones, was like the fair flower of Normandy; but her beauty was not Western, ’twas Eastern; it was like the pale Persian roses which blow by the gray-marbled waterways among the fallen pillars of the forgotten gardens of Istakhr,--roses of yesterday, full of yesterday’s unbearable loveliness, yesterday’s happiness, yesterday’s tragedy,--fragrant with passionate, heart-breaking perfume, piercingly sweet, with the pathos of swift-passing beauty, far keener than that of ruins and age. She was of a loveliness such as sometimes comes out of India unburned by the Indian sun, of which dreamers make dreams of unforgettable beauty. Her slender young body was like a piece of perfect ivory laid away to be carved. Her long, dark, tangled eye-lashes fell upon her cheeks like sudden gusts of darkening rain; her cheeks were japonica-color; her lips pale pomegranate-red; her hair ebony; her temples were traced with crocus-blue. Her cheeks japonica-color? They were the hue of peach flowers at dusk: God who gave them knew whence came both peach flower color and dusk. At every breath there came and went beneath her transparent skin a shadowy crimson under-dusk, ebbing and flowing with the beat of her heart like a somber, twilit tide,--San Domingo’s _sang de crépuscule_; and through her fingers the sunlight shone with a golden radiance like the glow of a rose through a glass of madeira. She might have been sister to Scheherazade in her exquisite, aquiline, high-born loveliness, a patrician beauty strangely like that of old French romance. Far and away beyond compare she was the loveliest girl in St. Finbar’s parish; and the faces of the young girls in St. Finbar’s made that ancient, dim, gray parish bloom like the gardens of Paradise. God, who knows everything, knows whence she had her exquisite, slender body, her aristocratic face, the dusky crimson tide, the touch of fantasy which made her lovely as a strain of wild, passionate music played on the deep strings of a gipsy violin.