As she thus stood, an acute student of Lavater might have recognized, in her harsh and wasted countenance, signs of an original nature superior to that of her visitor; on her knitted brow, a sense higher in quality than on his smooth low forehead; on her straight stern lip, less cause for distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome mouth into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not to affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the woman to be rather by natural temperament passionate and impulsive than systematically cruel or deliberately-false,--false or cruel only as some predominating passion became the soul’s absolute tyrant, and adopted the tyrant’s vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall, which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek human animal before her. In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,--the stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by boarding-schools from Tasso, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors, Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos, if not into their penetralia,--botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim as soldiers on parade stood the books,--not a gap in their ranks,--evidently never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet faded, dusty; relics of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have been prizes at school, or birthday gifts from proud relations. There, too, on the table, near the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,--no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from “lessons for beginners” to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird-cage, the bird long since dead. In a word, round the woman gazing on Jasper Losely, as he complacently drank his brandy, grouped the forlorn tokens of an early state,--the lost golden age of happy girlish studies, of harmless girlish tastes. “Basta, eno’,” said Mr. Losely, pushing aside the glass which he had twice filled and twice drained, “to business. Let me see the child: I feel up to it now.”