On the far side of a garden and paddock the view overlooked a stream, some farm buildings which lay beyond, and the opening of a wooded, rocky pass (called, in Somersetshire, a Combe), which here cleft its way through the hills that closed the prospect.  A winding strip of road was visible, at no great distance, amid the undulations of the open ground; and along this strip the stalwart figure of Mr. Vanstone was now easily recognizable, returning to the house from his morning walk.  He flourished his stick gayly, as he observed his eldest daughter at the window.  She nodded and waved her hand in return, very gracefully and prettily—­but with something of old-fashioned formality in her manner, which looked strangely in so young a woman, and which seemed out of harmony with a salutation addressed to her father.

The hall-clock struck the adjourned breakfast-hour.  When the minute hand had recorded the lapse of five minutes more a door banged in the bedroom regions—­a clear young voice was heard singing blithely—­light, rapid footsteps pattered on the upper stairs, descended with a jump to the landing, and pattered again, faster than ever, down the lower flight.  In another moment the youngest of Mr. Vanstone’s two daughters (and two only surviving children) dashed into view on the dingy old oaken stairs, with the suddenness of a flash of light; and clearing the last three steps into the hall at a jump, presented herself breathless in the breakfast-room to make the family circle complete.

By one of those strange caprices of Nature, which science leaves still unexplained, the youngest of Mr. Vanstone’s children presented no recognizable resemblance to either of her parents.  How had she come by her hair? how had she come by her eyes?  Even her father and mother had asked themselves those questions, as she grew up to girlhood, and had been sorely perplexed to answer them.  Her hair was of that purely light-brown hue, unmixed with flaxen, or yellow, or red—­which is oftener seen on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human being.  It was soft and plentiful, and waved downward from her low forehead in regular folds—­but, to some tastes, it was dull and dead, in its absolute want of glossiness, in its monotonous purity of plain light color.  Her eyebrows and eyelashes were just a shade darker than her hair, and seemed made expressly for those violet-blue eyes, which assert their most irresistible charm when associated with a fair complexion.  But it was here exactly that the promise of her face failed of performance in the most startling manner.  The eyes, which should have been dark, were incomprehensibly and discordantly light; they were of that nearly colorless gray which, though little attractive in itself, possesses the rare compensating merit of interpreting the finest gradations of thought, the gentlest changes of feeling, the deepest trouble of passion, with a subtle transparency of expression which no darker eyes can rival.