Gwendolen was fair almost to the extreme of golden blondness. Her features were small and perfectly related; her nose deliciously interrogative at the tip. Her brows and lashes, drawn in a darker hue, gave touches of character and distinction. She was very slender, erect, and was poised as though she grew in the wind. The long tulle draperies shook and stirred as if vitalized by her energy. She was all white and gold. Her heaped-up skeins of hair, amber necklace, gloves, slippers, and stockings gleamed with a primrose hue, and the freckles on her orchids (poor flowers, just caught up hastily from an ignominious corner) repeated the yellow note. Beside her, Yuki Onda, a few inches lacking in height, impressive, nevertheless, and held with a striking yet indefinable difference of line, smiled out like a frail Astarte. Her pallor had an undernote of ivory, where Gwendolen's was of pearl. Her head, with its pointed chin, bore, like a diadem of jet,--balanced, like a regal burden,--the spread wings of her hair. Beneath a white, low brow her eyes made almost a continuous, gleaming line. The little nose came down, straight and firm, with a single brush stroke. All the humanity, the tenderness, the womanhood of her face lay in the red mouth and the small, round chin. Her smile was startling, even pathetic, in beauty. Gwendolen had once said, "There is sometimes something in Yuki's smile that makes me want to fight God for her." Yuki's robe, in deference to hours of pleading from Gwendolen and Pierre Le Beau, was Japanese to the least detail. Mrs. Todd had protested in vain for the "civilized" coming-out gown of white. The robe hung about the girl in long, loose folds of cræpe, mist-gray, rising in soft transitions from the dark band of the hem to pearl tones at the throat. Under it were garments of heavier silk, dawn-colored, showing like morning through thin clouds. Into the curdled substance of the cræpe, cherry-flowers were dyed, or rather, breathed in, by a smiling, wrinkled brown magician at the rim of Yuzen Creek,--pale shapes which glimmered and were gone, rose to the surface and sank again, as though borne in moving water. Besides the black note of her hair there was one strong crash of contrast in the obi, or sash, a broad and dominating zone, black, too, with fire-flies of gold upon it. For hair-ornaments she wore a cluster of small pink flowers that had the look of cherry-blooms, and a great carved ivory pin, pronged like a tuning-fork, an heirloom in her father's family. "Gwendo--_len_! Yu-_kee_! Come down instantly!" rose the voice of Mrs. Todd. "You should have been down ten minutes ago." "Ah, Madame Todd calls," exclaimed the dressmaker, scrambling to her feet. "But you are sure you really admire us, Madame?" challenged Gwendolen, before she would stir. "Oui, charmante, charmante, both are perfection apart--and a vision of paradise together. But go, young ladies, the good mother calls again."