But while his eyes were hard and cold and gray, hers were of that dense black in which there seems such an unfathomable and mysterious depth.

As she was the handsomest, so she was also the worst-dressed woman in the room.

Her flimsy silk mantle had faded from black to rusty brown; the straw hat which shaded her face was sunburnt; the ribbons had lost their brightness; but there was an air of attempted fashion in the puffings and trimmings of her alpaca skirt; and there was evidence of a struggle with poverty in the tight-fitting lavender gloves, whose streaky lines bore witness to the imperfection of the cleaner's art.

Elegant Parisians and the select of Brussels glanced at the military Englishman and his handsome daughter with some slight touch of supercilious surprise--one has no right to find shabbily-dressed young women in the golden temple--and it is scarcely necessary to state that it was from her own countrywomen the young person in alpaca received the most chilling glances.

But those Parthian arrows shot from feminine eyes had little power to wound their object just now.