secured the more salient points with safety-pins. It was not a gown--no homogeneous creation of any sane mind. It had none of a real gown’s individuality; it was a mere haphazard covering. Then her boots: again, as she sat in the settle, the lamplight caught their toes: they were both wrinkled and bulgy, an ingenious prodigy of the incorrect. As Kingston watched them in the little oaken room, the lamplight seemed to concentrate its efforts on their shapeless points: they held his gaze as if by mesmerism, and seemed to swell monstrously and waver gigantic in the gloom, till the world was swallowed up in those amorphous lumps. It was some time before Kingston could turn his attention from the clothes to the woman that they so disastrously symbolized. Here, too, he met at every point with a violation of all his favourite canons. Isabel Darrell was evidently as untidy as her garments. Her figure was long and elastic. Only a certain arrogant untidiness of carriage could save her from the reproach of lankiness. She walked with a free unconventional swing from the hips, with a sort of bounding spring that might have been more pleasantly noteworthy had it not set her hat mopping and mowing afresh at every step. At every step it jauntily jumped, up and down, and from right to left, until the attention was concentrated on its antics rather than on any beauties that might have been found in the gait which compelled them. Very different indeed was the barbaric looseness of Isabel’s movement from the neat and civilized precision of Gundred’s every motion. That she wore no stays was very evident, and the flapping freedom of her legs suggested that her nature had been built for breeches rather than for petticoats.