She was very fair to look upon--complete and beautiful as a pearl--with that outward purity, that perfect delicacy of tint and harmony of detail which is in itself a charm. Study her as captiously as you would, you could find no flaw in this jewel. The small regular features were so delicately chiselled, the fair fine skin was so transparent, the fragile figure so exquisitely moulded, the ivory hand and arm so perfect--no, you could discover no bad drawing or crude colouring in this human picture. She lifted her clear blue eyes to Rorie's face, and smiled at him in gentle welcome; and though he felt intensely cross at having been summoned home like a school-boy, he could not refuse her a responsive smile, or a gentle pressure of the taper fingers. "And so you have been dining with those horrid people!" she exclaimed with an air of playful reproach, "and on your last night in Hampshire--quite too unkind to Aunt Jane." "I don't know whom you mean by horrid people, Mabel," answered Rorie, chilled back into sulkiness all at once; "the people I was with are all that is good and pleasant." "Then you've not been at the Tempests' after all?" "I have been at the Tempests'. What have you to say against the Tempests?" "Oh, I have nothing to say against them," said Lady Mabel, shrugging her pretty shoulders in her fawn-coloured silk gown. "There are some things that do not require to be said." "Mr. Tempest is the best and kindest of men; his wife is--well, a nonentity, perhaps, but not a disagreeable one; and his daughter----" Here Rorie came to a sudden stop, which Lady Mabel accentuated with a silvery little laugh. "His daughter is charming," she cried, when she had done laughing; "red hair, and a green habit with brass buttons, a yellow waistcoat like her papa's, and a rose in her button-hole. How I should like to see her in Rotten Row!" "I'll warrant there wouldn't be a better horse-woman or a prettier girl there," cried Rorie, scarlet with indignation. His mother looked daggers. His cousin gave another silvery laugh, clear as those pearly treble runs upon the Erard; but that pretty artificial laugh had a ring which betrayed her mortification. "Rorie is thorough," she said; "when he likes people he thinks them perfection. You do think that little red-haired girl quite perfection, now don't you, Rorie?" pursued Lady Mabel, sitting down before the piano again, and touching the notes silently as she seemed to admire the slender diamond hoops upon her white fingers--old-fashioned rings that had belonged to a patrician great-grandmother. "You think her quite a model young lady, though they say she can hardly read, and makes her mark--like William the Conqueror--instead of signing her name, and spends her life in the stables, and occasionally, when the fox gets back to earth--swears."