Nor was this surprising; Miss Montgomerie's travelling habit had been discarded for the more decorative ornaments of a dinner toilet, in which, however, the most marked simplicity was observed. A plain white muslin dress gave full development to a person which was of a perfection that no dress could have disguised. It was the bust of a Venus, united to a form, to create which would have taxed the imaginative powers of a Praxiteles--a form so faultlessly moulded, that every movement presented some new and unpremeditated grace. What added to the surpassing richness of her beauty was her hair, which, black, glossy, and of eastern luxuriance, and seemingly disdaining the girlishness of curls, reposed in broad Grecian bands across a brow, the intellectual expression of which they contributed to form. Yet never did woman exhibit in her person and face more opposite extremes of beauty. If the one was strikingly characteristic of warmth, the other was no less indicative of coldness. Fair, even to paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed to the observer, but certainly unallied to softness. Still she was beautiful--coldly, classically, beautiful--eminently calculated to inspire passion, but seemingly incapable of feeling it. The coldness of Miss Montgomerie's manner was no less remarkable. Her whole demeanor was one of abstraction. It seemed as if heedless, not only of ceremony, but of courtesy, her thoughts and feelings were far from the board of whose hospitality she was partaking. Indeed, the very few remarks she made during dinner referred to the period of departure of the boat, in which she was to be conveyed to Detroit, and on this subject she displayed an earnestness, which, even Grantham thought, might have been suppressed in the presence of his uncle's family. Perhaps he felt piqued at her readiness to leave him.