Roderick had taken out a note-book and was roughly sketching a memento of the great Juno.  Suddenly there was a noise on the gravel, and the young men, looking up, saw three persons advancing.  One was a woman of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows.  She looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her shoulder, as if to hasten the step of a young girl who slowly followed her.  She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a hospitable mood.  Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a pair of soiled light gloves.  He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction.  He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush.  He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him.  At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty.  She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect.  He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweler’s cotton, and his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons.  He stepped along stiffly and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance.  There was something at first slightly ridiculous in the sight of a young lady gravely appended to an animal of these incongruous attributes, and Roderick, with his customary frankness, greeted the spectacle with a confident smile.  The young girl perceived it and turned her face full upon him, with a gaze intended apparently to enforce greater deference.  It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled, submissive admiration; Roderick’s smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring.  A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess—­these were the general features of his vision.  The young lady was walking slowly and letting her long dress rustle over the gravel; the young men had time to see her distinctly before she averted her face and went her way.  She left a vague, sweet perfume behind her as she passed.

“Immortal powers!” cried Roderick, “what a vision!  In the name of transcendent perfection, who is she?” He sprang up and stood looking after her until she rounded a turn in the avenue.  “What a movement, what a manner, what a poise of the head!  I wonder if she would sit to me.”