Then this earlier impression slightly faded away, and he merely beheld her alone, a perfect stranger appropriating little by little her few claims to womanly beauty.

There was no certain guessing at her age as she lay thus, one hand pressed beneath her cheek, her eyes closed, the long, dark lashes clearly outlined against the white flesh, her bosom rising and falling with the steady breathing of absolute exhaustion.

She appeared so extremely tired, discouraged, unhappy, that the young man involuntarily closed his teeth tightly, as though some wrong had been personally done to himself.

He marked the dense blackness of her heavy mass of hair; the perfect clearness of her skin; the shapeliness of the slender, outstretched figure; the narrow boot, with its high-arched instep, peeping shyly beneath the blue skirt; the something rarely interesting, yet which scarcely made for beauty, revealed unconsciously in the upturned face with its rounded chin and parted lips.
There was no distinct regularity of features, but there was unquestionably character, such character as we recognize vaguely in a sculptured face, lacking that life-like expression which the opened eyes alone are capable of rendering.

All this swept across his mind in that instant during which he remained irresolute from surprise.