The eldest girl, the beauty of the family, was composed of somewhat discordant elements. In person she was eminently attractive, her figure was tall and commanding, and its outline was as graceful as its air was majestic. Her face, as we have said, was extremely beautiful, but he must have a bold heart, who, falling in love with it, would woo her in the expectation that he could win her with ease and retain her by indifference. Her features were regular, her eyes large, glittering, and of that deep brown which is often mistaken for black; her eyelids were full, and her eyelashes so long as really to form a fringe to the lid. Her eyebrows were arched, her hair was darker than her eyes, and not less brilliant. Her mouth was small, yet it had a sensual fulness, no less apparent then the scornful curl which ever seemed to keep it in a state of unrest. As the hand of her maid was skilled, and incessantly in requisition, the arrangement of her tresses--that wondrous ornament to woman--may be said to have been faultless. Her attire was admirably chosen to assist her beauty, and its fit was a triumph of the _modiste’s_ art. Her mother had instilled into her a belief that she was a queen of beauty, and she looked, thought, moved, as though she were an empress. As yet it was supposed that her affections had not been touched; from infancy she had been tutored to believe that to be human in feeling was to descend to the level of the common herd--that the world and what it contained were made for her, not she for the world. She was gifted with all the elements of which energy and passion are composed, and she was capable of loving with a force not often allotted even to woman; but her passions, her energies, her tenderness, had been rendered dormant by the counsels of worldly pride, as the warm, gushing, health-giving stream is converted by a slow frost into a silent, motionless block of ice. Should there come before her eyes the man whose physical beauty and whose mental intelligence woke up her heart from its icy dream into passionate life, and that love should prove to be unrequited--woe! woe! to her! and possibly to him! She had been named Helen after a maternal relative, from whom the most exaggerated expectations were entertained, and she bore it as though she, in virtue of it, already possessed the vast inheritance it was understood to foreshadow.