In fact, her features were all perfect, yet it often happened that their general expression was productive of no agreeable feeling on the beholder.

Sometimes her smile was sweet as that of an angel, but let a single impulse or whim be checked, and her face assumed a character of malignity that made her beauty appear like that which we dream of in an evil spirit.
The other woman, who stood to her in the relation of step-mother, was above the middle size.

Her hair was sandy, or approaching to a pale red; her features were coarse, but regular; and her whole figure that of a well-made and powerful woman.

In her countenance might be read a peculiar blending of sternness and benignity, each evidently softened down by an expression of melancholy--perhaps of suffering--as if some secret care lay brooding at her heart.

The inside of the hovel itself had every mark of poverty and destitution about it.