Beneath that faultless forehead burned unusually large eyes, deep as mountain tarns, and of that pure bluish gray that tolerates no hint of green or yellow rays. The dilated pupils intensified the steel color, and faint violet lines ran out from the iris to meet the central shadows, while above and below the heavy black fringes enhanced their sombre depths, where mournful mysteries seemed to float like corpses just beneath the crystal shroud of ocean waves. The pale, passionless lips,--perfect in their pure curves, but defrauded of the blood which resolutely refused to come to the surface and tint the fine satin skin,--were lined in ciphers that the curious questioned and wondered over, but which few could read and none fully comprehend. The beautiful, frigid mouth, where all sweetness was frozen out to make room for hopelessness and defiance, would have admirably suited some statue of discrowned and smitten Hecuba; and no amount of sighs and sobs, no stormy bursts of grief or fierce invective, could rival the melancholy eloquence of its mute, calm pallor. The wan face, with its gray globe-like eyes, and the metallic glitter of the prematurely silvered hair, matched in hue the pearl-colored muslin dress which fluttered in the wind; and, standing there, this gray woman of twenty-three looked indeed like Pygmalion's stone darling,-- "Fair-statured, noble, like an awful thing Frozen upon the very verge of life, And looking back along eternity With rayless eyes that keep the shadow Time." Her frail, white hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent, were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like pulses of sullen _sang azure_. Bending over the carnations, she examined the gorgeous hues,--toyed with their fragile stems,--and then, glancing shyly over her shoulder like a startled fawn half expectant of hounds and hunter, she glided rapidly to an artificial mound crowned with a mouldering mossy plaster image of Ariadne and her pard, and stood surveying her new domain. "Solitude" filled a semicircular hollow between low wooded hills, which ran down to lave their grassy flanks in the blue brine of the Atlantic, and constituted the horns of a crescent bay, on whose sloping sandy beach the billows broke without barrier.