refined contours; but these it would not be difficult to match in any morning’s walk.  It is when she smiles that her face, it seems to me, is one of the most wonderful in the world.  Till she smiles, it is like the score of some great composer’s song before the musician releases it warbling for joy along the trembling keys; it is like the statue of Memnon before the dawn steals to kiss it across the desert.  White Soul’s face when she smiles is made, you would say, of larks and dew, of nightingales and stars.

She is an eldritch little creature, a little frightening to live with—­with her gold flaxen hair that seems to grow blonder as it nears her head:  burnt blonde, it would seem, with the white light of the spirit that pours all day long from her brows.  There is something, as we say, almost supernatural about her—­’a fairy’s child.’  The gypsies have a share in her blood, she boasts in her naive way, and with her love for all that is free and lawless and under-the-sky—­but I always say the fairies have more.  She is constantly saying ‘Hush!’ and ‘Whisht!’ when no one else can hear a sound, and she dreams the quaintest of dreams.

Once she woke sobbing in the night and told her husband, who knew her ways and loved her tenfold for them, that she had dreamed herself in the old churchyard, and that as the moon rose behind the tower the three old men who live in the three yew-trees had come out and played cards upon a tomb in the moonlight, and one of them had beckoned to her and offered to tell her fortune.  It fell out that she was to die in the spring, and as he held up the fatal card, the old man had leered at her—­and then a cock crew, all three vanished, and she awoke.

Her dreams are nearly all about dying, and, though she is obviously robust, there is that transparent ethereal look in her face which makes old women say ‘she is not long for this world,’ that fateful beauty which creates an atmosphere of doom about it.  You cannot look at her without a queer involuntary feeling that she was born to die in some tragic way.  She reminds one of those perilously fragile vases we feel must get broken, those rarely delicate flowers we feel cannot have strong healthy roots.

She is one of those who seem born to see terrible things, monstrous accidents, supernatural appearances.  She has seen death and birth in strange uncanny forms; and she has met with unearthly creatures in the lonely corners of rooms.  She is a ‘seventh-month child,’ and ‘seventh-month children always see things,’ she says, with a funny little sententious shake of her head.

Yet, with all this, she is the sunniest, healthiest, most domestic little soul that breathes; and no doubt the materialist would be right in saying that all this ‘spirituelle’ nonsense is but a trick of her transparent blonde complexion, a chance quality in the colour of her great luminous eyes.