Her face, when you came to look at it, was not, perhaps, quite so terrible as might have been expected. In fact, Kingston found it rather disappointing in its possibilities. He consoled himself by noticing that the mouth was ridiculously wide, revealing, too, a glimpse of gold; but, still, it was an eager, mobile mouth, full of energetic vitality. Gundred’s pretty, definite lips invariably preserved their proper lines; but Isabel’s had smiles and flashes of feeling that kept no limits and obeyed no conventions. Agile, too, and expressive beyond due bounds, they had a gleaming redness that was put to shame by the decent pallor of her cousin’s. Her face was irregular, uneven, unconventional, yet not without a certain heady and unlawful charm. Like her mouth, it was so very much alive. It did not seem, as did Gundred’s, to be a moulded mask, but to be the woman’s very own naked soul. The claim of her birth was clear in the strangely delicate beauty of her ears--the only part of her that could ever, by any possibility, be called neat or dainty--and in the firm, fine curves of her nose and upper lip. The nose especially, swift and decided in its line, carried high and defiant, had the long thin nostrils, sensitive, fierce, cruel in their lifted curve, that one sees in the conspicuous women of old ferocious days. Kingston and Gundred had seen them in the face of Isabel the Queen. As for the rest of her character, a student might have found traces of uncontrolled personality in her broad forehead, heavy along the supraciliary ridge, and in the deep set of her eyes. The eyes themselves were big and ardent, of that grey-green whose precise tone can never be actually discerned. Golden at one time, emerald at another, they are always vivid, blazing, inscrutable. And over all hung in a dense cloud the heavy obscurity of her hair. Black as darkness it was, long, straight, and utterly impatient of restraint. Its arrangement was of a piece with Miss Darrell’s whole accoutrement. Evidently she was content with twirling it into a rough lump, poking it here, pinning it inadequately there. At every point it burst its bonds: loose coils and ropes were dropping and trailing unreproved; each movement, each jump of the hat, set free a fresh strand. Miss Darrell clearly counted on the hat’s pressure to preserve at least some semblance of order; but that unhappy adornment was powerless to exert any influence; it jigged and jolted as the hair dictated, and the mass on the top of her head hopped happily in a unanimous heap as she went, carrying the hat unresisting to its sway.