WHEN Henry was seated alongside the carrier that fateful morning long ago--Henry, you must be more than twenty-two!--he had to pass the cottage of old Carne the sexton, and a sweet face, jewelled with a pair of violet eyes, looked out between the curtains, a girl's hand rattled on the window-pane. The owner of these eyes had been playing with a caterpillar when Henry went round the village telling everybody he met that he was going away to Stratford--her among the rest. But surely that was ages ago! "I could never have been such a young ass," Henry would say to a certainty if you were to ask him at the mirror. Well, here is Eunice Lyndon in proof of the fact that it was almost six years since. At all events, she says she is just nineteen, and she was thirteen then. She doesn't play with caterpillars now; but her eyes are certainly violet, though Henry probably thought they were blue, if he thought of them at all. The six years have wrought wonders in the girl who rattled on the window when Henry went forth to the fray. For one thing, Eunice, who was the chum of Dora, and thus a frequent visitor in the Charles household, had discredited the croakers by continuing to live and even to strengthen, despite the fact of her mother's consumptive end. Poor Mrs. Charles, who had seldom a chance of opening her mouth on any topic, never avoided stating, as an article of her faith, that all children of consumptive parents were doomed as clearly as though their sentence had been passed by a hanging judge. It was positively an insult to her and to many another anxious mother for the progeny of consumptive parents to go on living. For such to wax strong was against Nature, and in the teeth of medical experience. Eunice had offended Nature, diddled the doctors, and looked all the better for the offence. The pasty whiteness of her girlhood had given place to a creamy freshness, which blended perfectly with her high colour--so you see her red cheeks were not the flame of consumption, but the bloom of health. Her colour was of that intensity which seems to come from the atmosphere around the face, and to shine upon the skin as a shaft of ruby light, carried by the sunbeams through a cathedral window, glows on a marble statue. Her features were pretty, but with no mere prettiness. They were marked by character. The nose would have been a despised model for a Grecian; the mouth not dollishly small, yet small, firm-set, the firmness being saved from shrewish suggestion by an upward ending of the lips. Eunice had a chin; a most essential quality in man and woman, sometimes unhappily omitted. A chin that said: "Yes, I mean what I say; and I mean to say what I mean." Eyes that--well, they were violet eyes, and what more can one say? A forehead not high, but wide, to carry a wealth of lustrous dark hair.