Agneta Stanhope was in perfect health of body and mind, yet she appeared at Copley Grange Farm like a hothouse flower which had never been exposed to sun or wind, while welcoming them with such a sweet exultant wooing of their tanning, hardening influences, as added to the grace of her ignorance and helplessness—such ignorance and helplessness as charm in a gentle young foreigner who is all frankness and guilelessness, and willingly makes herself at home in a hitherto unexplored region, of which the rude simplicity alone is perceptible to her. In such a _rôle_ Agneta Stanhope was still more engaging and interesting than beautiful. Indeed her greatest claim to beauty lay in the air of exquisite tender fragility—which had to do with her rearing, but not with her character, not even with her constitution, in spite of her slight figure, which, however, was elastic and wiry enough—and the sky-blueness of her eyes—like Harry’s, very unlike Catherine Hilliard’s—set in a miniature face, the colour of which inclined to that of a lily rather than of a rose, when she came first, though a single week’s life with her brothers brought into the soft cheeks a tinge of the red which qualifies the whiteness of apple-blossom. It was really in all respects as if Agneta Stanhope were visiting her brothers in one of the distant colonies to which they had been originally destined, though she was not reduced to washing her clothes or baking her bread; certainly she would not have objected to these sports in her ignorance of what they led to. On the one hand, she was childishly ignorant, a creature who had never stood alone or thought for herself, or been conscious of a single responsibility to her fellow-creatures since she was born, while—like Catherine Hilliard here—neither had she been of vital consequence to anybody, or been cherished and petted, as might well have been the lot of such a girl in different circumstances. She had suffered a curiously crippling experience of life on two sides of her nature. On another, she was precocious, and early instructed in obligations, necessities, and experiences; but this element in her education and second nature was not on the surface or readily perceived.