The taller and perhaps by a year the elder--she of the rose--was the daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a radius of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others might do among the chords of a harp. In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair was very dark and very profuse--so near to black that it needed the sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully apparent--swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded, rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy, though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark--so dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!" and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept