But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those eyes.

She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if we but see the one look upward, fall away.

Reason is not excluded from these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates.

Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim on her.

Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the good predominated.