Meanwhile Gundred was pouring forth a stream of pleasantness. Her gentle voice ran on in an orderly melody, expounding the joy that she and Kingston felt in welcoming a kinswoman to Brakelond. And, as she spoke, not a detail of her cousin’s untidiness escaped her eye. But the pitying disapproval that she felt found no hint of expression in her voice. Tone and manner remained calm, dispassionate, colourless as ever. Isabel, for her part, had no such nice polish, and made no attempt to conceal her excitement. Her eye roved, her head went eagerly from side to side, scanning her surroundings. When Gundred paused, she interposed some quick question, some keen remark on what she saw. But to her cousin’s formal little speeches she was evidently not attending. Her manners were careless as her dress. Kingston, taking no part in the dialogue, devoted himself to watchful criticism of the enemy. He noticed how the smile flickered and flashed across her eager face, and how the fine nostrils thrilled and contracted now and again with enthusiasm. Those nostrils, he felt, were well known. Where had he seen them? He did not remember the face of the She-Wolf Queen, but, as he looked at that of Isabel, stronger and stronger grew his impression that it was no stranger. His hostile feelings grew and deepened. The face, the manner, the charm of Isabel made some vehement, inexplicable claim upon him; and in his resistance to so unreasonable a call, his attitude stiffened itself into a determined enmity. There could be nothing appealing or desirable about this sloppy, disorderly creature, yet he felt the beginning--was it the beginning or the renewal?--of a paradoxical fascination that contradicted his own most cherished sense of what was admirable. He looked again at Gundred, and strenuously admired her neat, cool beauty, the perfection of her appointments, her gestures, her inflections, her expressions. Nothing was wrong there; no criticism could be made: it was all just right; there was the admirable, incarnate.