She had already cast many curious glances at the Thornburgh's guest.

'Not a prig, at any rate,' she thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.' As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times, he was inwardly confessing that Mrs.Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow with her still unsoftened angles and movements was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes' conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk.

As to Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant eyes.
She, too, was in white.

As she turned to speak to the youth at her side.
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip.

The hollows in the cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin.