“That’s a very charming woman,” whispered one of the strangers at the house to one of the friends of the house.  “Who is she?”

The friend whispered back.

“Miss Lundie’s governess—­that’s all.”

The moment during which the question was put and answered was also the moment which brought Lady Lundie and Miss Silvester face to face in the presence of the company.

The stranger at the house looked at the two women, and whispered again.

“Something wrong between the lady and the governess,” he said.

The friend looked also, and answered, in one emphatic word: 

“Evidently!”

There are certain women whose influence over men is an unfathomable mystery to observers of their own sex.  The governess was one of those women.  She had inherited the charm, but not the beauty, of her unhappy mother.  Judge her by the standard set up in the illustrated gift-books and the print-shop windows—­and the sentence must have inevitably followed.  “She has not a single good feature in her face.”

There was nothing individually remarkable about Miss Silvester, seen in a state of repose.  She was of the average height.  She was as well made as most women.  In hair and complexion she was neither light nor dark, but provokingly neutral just between the two.  Worse even than this, there were positive defects in her face, which it was impossible to deny.  A nervous contraction at one corner of her mouth drew up the lips out of the symmetrically right line, when, they moved.  A nervous uncertainty in the eye on the same side narrowly escaped presenting the deformity of a “cast.”  And yet, with these indisputable drawbacks, here was one of those women—­the formidable few—­who have the hearts of men and the peace of families at their mercy.  She moved—­and there was some subtle charm, Sir, in the movement, that made you look back, and suspend your conversation with your friend, and watch her silently while she walked.  She sat by you and talked to you—­and behold, a sensitive something passed into that little twist at the corner of the mouth, and into that nervous uncertainty in the soft gray eye, which turned defect into beauty—­which enchained your senses—­which made your nerves thrill if she touched you by accident, and set your heart beating if you looked at the same book with her, and felt her breath on your face.  All this, let it be well understood, only happened if you were a man.

If you saw her with the eyes of a woman, the results were of quite another kind.  In that case you merely turned to your nearest female friend, and said, with unaffected pity for the other sex, “What can the men see in her!”

The eyes of the lady of the house and the eyes of the governess met, with marked distrust on either side.  Few people could have failed to see what the stranger and the friend had noticed alike—­that there was something smoldering under the surface here.  Miss Silvester spoke first.