stray lock escaped, framed her fresh cheeks most admirably; her strong white hands appeared and disappeared with an absolute regularity through the dark-green wool out of which she was evolving a hideous and useful shawl. To her lodger, who alternately waved a palm-leaf fan and drank lemonade, reading at intervals from a two-days-old newspaper, and carrying on the desultory and amusing soliloquy that they were pleased to consider conversation, she presented the most attractive of pictures. “So firm, so positive, so wholesome,” he murmured to himself, calling her attention to the exquisite effect of the slanting rays that struck the lawn in a dappled pattern of flickering leaf-shadows, and remarking the violet tinge thrown by the setting sun on the old spire below in the middle of the village. She did not answer immediately, and when she did it was in tones that he had learned from various slight experiments to regard as final.
