’It was not for me to say—­but you know, Austin, you always were an ugly creature.  How shocked and indignant the little girl looks!  You must not be vexed, you loyal little woman, with Cousin Monica for telling the truth.  Papa was and will be ugly all his days.  Come, Austin, dear, tell her—­is not it so?’

‘What! depose against myself!  That’s not English law, Monica.’

’Well, maybe not; but if the child won’t believe her own eyes, how is she to believe me?  She has long, pretty hands—­you have—­and very nice feet too.  How old is she?’

‘How old, child?’ said my father to me, transferring the question.

She recurred again to my eyes.

’That is the true grey—­large, deep, soft—­very peculiar.  Yes, dear, very pretty—­long lashes, and such bright tints!  You’ll be in the Book of Beauty, my dear, when you come out, and have all the poet people writing verses to the tip of your nose—­and a very pretty little nose it is!’

I must mention here how striking was the change in my father’s spirit while talking and listening to his odd and voluble old Cousin Monica.  Reflected from bygone associations, there had come a glimmer of something, not gaiety, indeed, but like an appreciation of gaiety.  The gloom and inflexibility were gone, and there was an evident encouragement and enjoyment of the incessant sallies of his bustling visitor.

How morbid must have been the tendencies of his habitual solitude, I think, appeared from the evident thawing and brightening that accompanied even this transient gleam of human society.  I was not a companion—­more childish than most girls of my age, and trained in all his whimsical ways, never to interrupt a silence, or force his thoughts by unexpected question or remark out of their monotonous or painful channel.

I was as much surprised at the good-humour with which he submitted to his cousin’s saucy talk; and, indeed, just then those black-panelled and pictured walls, and that quaint, misshapen room, seemed to have exchanged their stern and awful character for something wonderfully pleasanter to me, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personal criticism to which the plain-spoken lady chose to subject me.

Just at that moment Captain Oakley joined us.  He was my first actual vision of that awful and distant world of fashion, of whose splendours I had already read something in the three-volumed gospel of the circulating library.

Handsome, elegant, with features almost feminine, and soft, wavy, black hair, whiskers and moustache, he was altogether such a knight as I had never beheld, or even fancied, at Knowl—­a hero of another species, and from the region of the demigods.  I did not then perceive that coldness of the eye, and cruel curl of the voluptuous lip—­only a suspicion, yet enough to indicate the profligate man, and savouring of death unto death.

But I was young, and had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally sojourned for a week at a time.