The rapid walk brought brightness to eyes and cheeks, thereby doing much to restore that subtle air of perfect health and happiness that usually added so much to the girl's beauty. But always was Evarne fair to behold; her dark eyes, so large and limpid, were expressive and intense; her lips, alluring in curves and colour, spoke to the "seeing eye" of both kindliness and individuality. Yet she could have dispensed with all the charm given by mental grace, and still riveted attention, for she possessed loveliness of that type, supreme above all others, that is independent of expression--the beauty of grace, symmetry of form, and faultless feature. And for this she had been taught to thank--not chance, not merely heredity, but the determination of her father. Leopold Stornway had a passionate adoration for physical beauty, regarding it as almost the first of virtues. And more, he was proud of the vast importance he placed on bodily perfection, for was it not a reverence characteristic of classic Greece? There it was--in the records of the never-to-be-forgotten days of antiquity--that Leo found all his chief interests. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, and, above all, Greece--each in turn had been the lands of his adoption. Pericles and Cæsar, Cyrus and Rameses, Shalmanesur and Hiram, were the gods of his idolatry. He knew and cared more concerning the triumphant fortunes of Semiramis; the proceedings of Antigone or of Theseus; the adventures of Agamemnon or Achilles, of Hector or the pious Æneas at the Siege of Troy, than he did of the doings of those who sat in the seats of the mighty in his own century. The happiest time of his life had been his three years at Oxford. Almost immediately on leaving college he married--simply because she was beautiful as any Greek statue--a young woman considerably beneath him in station, and possessed of an unconquerably violent temper. He knew right well, even during the period of his deepest infatuation, that he had found no mate for his soul. He was sadly conscious that that part of his mind--of his spirit--that he cared for most deeply, never would--never could--unveil itself to the scrutiny of his chosen life-long companion.