“Well, you ought to know,” answered Forrester; “I never tried her much myself.  She’s two or three stone over my weight.  I wonder what she has been doing lately?  They sent her down to rusticate somewhere at the end of the season.  She ought to be in great condition now, with a summer’s run.”

Livingstone smiled, complacently I thought, as if some one had praised one of his favorite hunters, but did not pursue the subject.

When I came down before dinner he was talking to a lady in dark blue silk, with black lace over it, a wreath curiously plaited of natural ivy in her hair.  I guessed her at once to be Flora Bellasys.

Let me try to paint—­though abler artists have failed—­the handsomest brunette I have ever seen.

She was very tall; her figure magnificently developed, though slender-waisted and lithe as a serpent.  She walked as if she had been bred in a basquina, and her foot and ankle were hardly to be matched on this side of the Pyrenees; the nose slightly aquiline, with thin, transparent nostrils; and the forehead rather low—­it looked more so, perhaps, from the thick masses of dark hair which framed and shaded her face.  Under the clear, pale olive of the cheeks the rich blood mantled now and then like wine in a Venice glass; and her lips—­the outline of the upper one just defined by a penciling of down, the lower one full and pouting—­glistened with the brilliant smoothness of a pomegranate flower when the dew is clinging.  Her eyes—­the opium-eaters of Stamboul never dreamed of their peers among the bevies of hachis-houris.  They were of the very darkest hazel; one moment sleeping lazily under their long lashes, like a river under leaves of water-lilies; the next, sparkling like the same stream when the sunlight is splintered on its ripples into carcanets of diamonds.  When they chose to speak, not all the orators that have rounded periods since Isocrates could match their eloquence; when it was their will to guard a secret, they met you with the cold, impenetrable gaze that we attribute to the mighty mother, Cybele.  Even a philosopher might have been interested—­on purely psychological grounds, of course—­in watching the thoughts as they rose one by one to the surface of those deep, clear wells (was truth at the bottom of them?—­I doubt), like the strange shapes of beauty that reveal themselves to seamen, coyly and slowly, through the purple calm of the Indian Sea.

Twice I have chosen a watery simile; but I know no other element combining, as her glances did, liquid softness with lustre.

When near her, you were sensible of a strange, subtle, intoxicating perfume, very fragrant, perfectly indefinable, which clung, not only to her dress, but to every thing belonging to her.  From what flowers it was distilled no artist in essences alive could have told.  I incline to think that, like the “birk” in the ghost’s garland,

     “They were not grown on earthly bank,
     Nor yet on earthly sheugh.”