At this time Miss Pengarvon was close on her forty-fifth birthday. She was very tall, and grim, and gaunt. The normal expression of her features was harsh and forbidding. She had fine teeth, an aquiline nose, and unsympathetic blue-grey eyes, with a cold, stony gleam in them, deeply set under bushy brows--eyes which looked as though they had never melted with tenderness or softened with tears. The mass of her dark-brown hair, which began to show signs of the flight of time, was coiled round the crown of her head and held in its place by a high comb, while three small puffs or curls, which were generally kept in paper till mid-day, decorated each side of her forehead. When not engaged with her needle, she wore black lace mittens, and she always changed her morning dress of black bombazine for one of black silk before dinner. The dress she was wearing had been both dyed and turned, but was still good for two or three years' longer wear. Of Miss Letitia it is enough to say that she was a copy, in somewhat less pronounced colors, of her sister as far as one human being can be a copy of any other; indeed, by comparative strangers, she was not infrequently mistaken for Miss Pengarvon. She was two years younger than her sister, whose stronger will dominated hers, and who had still as complete an ascendency over her as when they had been children together. It was noticeable that if any of the servants, or any poor person, wanted a favor granted, or a kindness done them, they went by preference to Miss Letitia rather than to Miss Barbara. The Green Parlor, although it was traditionally supposed to be haunted, was the favorite sitting-room of the Misses Pengarvon, as it had been of their mother in her time. It was probably owing to the force of early associations that they clung to it as they did, seeing that there were many pleasanter rooms in the old house, some of them looking over the terrace and the garden beyond, or having views across miles of swelling moorland; whereas the two high, narrow windows of the Green Parlor looked into nothing more attractive than a small shaven lawn, shut in by a thick semicircular hedge of evergreens, and without any embellishment beyond such as might be afforded by a dilapidated and moss-grown sun-dial.