“So that is your mysterious young woman?” said Lady Curtis. “No, Julia, no, she has never been on the stage. They never walk like that when they have been on the stage. She doesn’t know how to walk; but there is a kind of gracefulness about her. I cannot say if she is handsome or not; but what can such a woman as that possibly want here?” “That is just what I never could make out,” said Cousin Julia, delighted to open forth on her favourite subject. Nancy just then turned round unconscious of the eyes bent upon her, to look at the cart with the baskets, and thus exposed herself unawares to the full gaze of her husband’s mother. Her long black dress gave a certain dignity to her figure, calling attention by its very plainness, and so did the little close black bonnet with its edge of white which encircled her face. Nancy in her ordinary garb and ordinary moods never had looked half so distinguished or lovely. Lady Curtis could not take her eyes from this face so softly tinted, so purely fresh and severely framed. “Why didn’t you tell me before? The girl is a beauty!” she said. “A beauty?” said Lucy, coming into the room; and she, too, gazed from behind her mother’s shoulder. Had she ever seen that face before? she asked herself, with an anxiety which neither of the others divined. She had seen it only once, for a minute or two, surrounded by clouds of bridal white. Was it likely she could recognise it now in this almost conventual severity of costume? She dropped behind her mother, half-satisfied, half-disappointed, and paid no attention to the further comments of Lady Curtis, which delighted Mrs. Rolt. If it was no one she had ever seen before--what did it matter to Lucy who it was? But when the two ladies had left Cousin Julia, after they had taken a few steps on the way home, Lady Curtis came to a sudden pause. “Don’t you think, Lucy,” she said, in a conciliatory tone, “that it would be only kind to call upon those new people? They must feel very strange in this quiet place; and as she really seems a lady--” “I am quite willing to go, mamma;” said Lucy, feeling her heart beat more quickly in spite of herself.