He was described as "looking like a stork," "staring like a caulf," "a face like a ghaist's." "Do you call that manners ?" she said; or, "I soon put him in his place." "'_Miss Christina_, _if you please_, _Mr.Weir_!' says I, and just flyped up my skirt tails." With gabble like this she would entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would perhaps fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would appear again from the darkness of the wall, and the voluble words deserted her, and she would lie still and stupid, and think upon nothing with devotion, and be sometimes raised by a quiet sigh.

Had a doctor of medicine come into that loft, he would have diagnosed a healthy, well-developed, eminently vivacious lass lying on her face in a fit of the sulks; not one who had just contracted, or was just contracting, a mortal sickness of the mind which should yet carry her towards death and despair.

Had it been a doctor of psychology, he might have been pardoned for divining in the girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love _in excelsis_, and no more.
It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the inarticulate.

Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost every word used too strong.

Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers, the names of definite and famous cities far distant, and now perhaps basking in sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as it were, at the foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and blinding wreaths of haze.
The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when she sat suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by that psalm-book which had already played a part so decisive in the first chapter of her love-story.