Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall--even taller than her daughter; and her form had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as "fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now--the truth must be told--it was not a specially lovable face to the acute observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow, and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned humility--that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was _pride_--pride in its most intense and concentrated form--pride in blood, wealth, personal appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view, from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident, to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less attractive,--and that she must have inherited from her dead father that softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her worthy of affection as well as admiration.