When we had passed the negro huts, swarming with black babies shining in the sun as sleek as mahogany, and all turning toward us with a marvellous flashing of white eyeballs and opening of red mouths of smiles, all at once, like some garden bed of black flowers, at the sight of our gay advance, we reached the great house, and Mistress Catherine stood in the door clad in a green satin gown which caught the light with smooth shimmers like the green sheath of a marsh lily. Her bare, slender arms were clasped before her, and her long, white neck was bent into an arch of watchful grace. Her face was the gravest I ever saw on maid, and not to be reconciled with my first acquaintance with her, thereby giving me always a slight doubt as of a mask, but her every feature was as clear and fine as ivory, and her head proudly crowned with great wealth of hair. Catherine Cavendish was esteemed a great beauty, by both men and women, which shows, perchance, that her beauty availed her little in some ways, else it had not been so freely admitted by her own sex. However that may be, Catherine Cavendish had had few lovers as compared with many a maid less fair and less dowered, and at this time she seemed to have settled into an expectation and contentment of singleness. She stood looking at her sister and me as we rode toward her, and the sun was full on her face, which had the cool glimmer of a pearl in the golden light, and her wide-open eyes never wavered. As she stood there she might have been the portrait of herself, such a look had she of unchanging quiet, and the wonder and incredulity which always seized me at the sight of her to reconcile what I knew with what she seemed, was strong upon me. When her young sister had dismounted and had gone up the steps, she kissed her, and the two entered the hall, clinging together in a way which was pretty to see. I never saw such love betwixt two where there was not full sympathy, and that was lacking always and lacked more in the future, through the difference in their two temperaments gotten from different mothers.