The servant looked back at this moment, as wondering why the visitor did not follow him; and after a little movement of hesitation, Mr. Crawford passed into the hall. Need it be said that Mrs. Champernowne's man-servant was not a common man-servant? He was a most gentlemanly creature, upon whom a livery would have been as much out of place as upon a bishop. A little powder in his hair was the sole badge of his servitude, and became him admirably. For the rest, his costume was such as might have been worn by the ideal curate or the poetic doctor of a young lady's novel. The grave dignity of his manner was more impressive than the concentrated insolence of twenty over-fed Jeameses. As you looked at him you were overpowered by a sense of your own inferiority. You felt instinctively that he had been intended for a higher sphere; that he, too, could number conspirators and court-poets amongst his ancestors; that his tastes were as refined as his manners and appearance; that he devoted his Sabbath leisure to the perusal of the _Saturday Review_, and would have fainted at the sight of a _Daily Telegraph_. The entrance-hall of the Hermitage was by no means spacious. A Persian carpet of moderate dimensions covered the centre of the floor, and protected the unwary stranger from the slipperiness of a tesselated pavement. The same subdued colour which pervaded the vestibule reigned in the hall, where there were yet more pale exotics and antique bronzes looming duskily through the shade. Curtains of soft grey silk shrouded a doorway, through which Mr. Crawford passed into the drawing-room, where there were again dark foliage and starry-white blossoms in the dim shade of grey-silk curtains lined with a pale rose colour, that faintly tinted the subdued light, and where two white Angora cats were sleeping peacefully amidst the fleecy fur of a huge polar-bearskin spread upon the hearth. It might have been the chamber of the Sleeping Beauty which Mr. Crawford had penetrated; and to support the delusion, a lady with closed eyes sat half-buried in the softest and deepest of easy-chairs. But she lifted her eyelids as the gentlemanly servant announced Mr. Crawford, and rose to receive him. She was tall and slender--a stern critic would have called her thin. She was dark and pale, with thick bands of black hair carried behind her ears, and gathered in a compact knot at the back of her head. If she had not been Mrs. Champernowne she would scarcely have been called handsome; but a plainer woman than she might have appeared beautiful amidst her surroundings. Whatever charm there was in her face was not to be traced to any perfection of feature; but in the shape of her small head, the perfect grace of her throat, the varying expression of her countenance, the refinement of her appearance, there lurked a charm rarely to be found in the splendour of perfect loveliness.