She looked as hard and cold and bitter, as she was beautiful; and Sir Norman began to perplex himself inwardly as to what had brought her here.
Surely not sympathy, for nothing wearing that face of stone, could even know the meaning of such a word.

While he looked at her, half wonderingly, half pityingly, half tenderly--a queer word that last, but the feeling was caused by her resemblance to Leoline--she had been moodily watching an old gray rat, the patriarch of his tribe, who was making toward her in short runs, stopping between each one to stare at her, out of his unpleasantly bright eyes.

Suddenly, Miranda shut her teeth, clenched her hands, and with a sort of fierce suppressed ejaculation, lifted her shining foot and planted it full on the rat's head.

So sudden, so fierce, and so strong, was the stamp, that the rat was crushed flat, and uttered a sharp and indignant squeal of expostulation, while Sir Norman looked at her, thinking she had lost her wits.

Still she ground it down with a fiercer and stronger force every second; and with her eyes still fixed upon it, and blazing with reddish black flame, she said, in a sort of fiery hiss: "Look at it! The ugly, loathsome thing! Did you ever see anything look more like him ?" There must have been some mysterious rapport between them, for he understood at once to whom the solitary personal pronoun referred.
"Certainly, in the general expression of countenance there is rather a marked resemblance, especially in the region of the teeth and eyes." "Except that the rat's eyes are a thousand times handsomer," she broke in, with a derisive laugh.
"But as to shape," resumed Sir Norman, eyeing the excited and astonished little animal, still shrilly squealing, with the glance of a connoisseur, "I confess I do not see it! The rat is straight and shapely--which his highness, with all reverence be it said--is not, but rather the reverse, if you will not be offended at me for saying so." She broke into a short laugh that had a hard, metallic ring, and then her face darkened, blackened, and she ground the foot that crushed the rat fiercer, and with a sort of passionate vindictiveness, as if she had the head of the dwarf under her heel.
"I hate him! I hate him!" she said, through her clenched teeth and though her tone was scarcely above a whisper, it was so terrible in its fiery earnestness that Sir Norman thrilled with repulsion.