Let us leave the conversation where it is, and look into the face of the speaker, who, young as she is, has already meditated so long upon the mystery of death that it has grown lovely in her eyes.

Her figure is tall, graceful, and slight, the severity of its outlines suiting well with the severity of her dress, with the brown stuff gown and plain grey whittle.  Her neck is long, almost too long:  but all defects are forgotten in the first look at her face.  We can see it fully, for her bonnet lies beside her on the rock.

The masque, though thin, is perfect.  The brow, like that of Greek statue, looks lower than it really is, for the hair springs from below the bend of the forehead.  The brain is very long, and sweeps backward and upward in grand curves, till it attains above the ears a great expanse and height.  She should be a character more able to feel than to argue; full of all a woman’s veneration, devotion, love of children,—­perhaps, too, of a woman’s anxiety.

The nose is slightly aquiline; the sharp-cut nostrils indicate a reserve of compressed strength and passion; the mouth is delicate; the lips, which are full and somewhat heavy, not from coarseness, but rather from languor, show somewhat of both the upper and the under teeth.  Her eyes are bent on the pool at her feet; so that we can see nothing of them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long and dark that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghostlike paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, waxen hue.

And now she lifts her eyes,—­dark eyes, of preternatural largeness; brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond; brilliant as deep clear wells are, in which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathom-deep between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the wide-opened lips, and arching eyebrow, and slightly wrinkled forehead, hangs an air of melancholy thought, vague doubt, almost of startled fear; then that expression passes, and the whole face collapses into a languor of patient sadness, which seems to say,—­“I cannot solve the mystery.  Let Him solve it as seems good to Him.”

The pier has, as usual, two stages; the upper and narrower for a public promenade, the lower and broader one for business.  Two rough collier-lads, strangers to the place, are lounging on the wall above, and begin, out of mere mischief, dropping pebbles on the group below.

“Hillo! you young rascals,” calls an old man lounging like them on the wall; “if you don’t drop that, you’re likely to get your heads broken.”

“Will you do it?”

“I would thirty years ago; but I’ll find a dozen in five minutes who will do it now.  Here, lads! here’s two Welsh vagabonds pelting our schoolmistress.”