Her quiet companion had come down very
quietly into the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel.
She had a neat but very ancient blue tam-o'-shanter on her head,
and was pulling some rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands.
Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair;
the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness: for a woman's clothes
never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by accident.
But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive.
In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light.
A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass,
will be full of the fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth.
The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was like some
triangular piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour
of hours before. Mary, though she was always graceful,
could never before have properly been called beautiful; and yet
her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful as to make
a man catch his breath.
"O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
"but how did you tell her?"
"It is quite easy to tell her," answered Diana sombrely;
"it makes no impression at all.
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