and a clasp of Moorish jewel-work.  Beneath it, a bodice of darker silk showed at the arms and neck, with loose sleeves in keeping.  The whole costume, though quite simple in style, a compromise either for afternoon or evening, was charming in its novelty, charming too in the way it permitted the utmost liberty and variety of movement to the lithe limbs of its wearer.  But it was her face particularly that struck Alan Merrick at first sight.  That face was above all things the face of a free woman.  Something so frank and fearless shone in Herminia’s glance, as her eye met his, that Alan, who respected human freedom above all other qualities in man or woman, was taken on the spot by its perfect air of untrammelled liberty.  Yet it was subtle and beautiful too, undeniably beautiful.  Herminia Barton’s features, I think, were even more striking in their way in later life, when sorrow had stamped her, and the mark of her willing martyrdom for humanity’s sake was deeply printed upon them.  But their beauty then was the beauty of holiness, which not all can appreciate.  In her younger days, as Alan Merrick first saw her, she was beautiful still with the first flush of health and strength and womanhood in a free and vigorous English girl’s body.  A certain lofty serenity, not untouched with pathos, seemed to strike the keynote.  But that was not all.  Some hint of every element in the highest loveliness met in that face and form,—­physical, intellectual, emotional, moral.

“You’ll like him, Herminia,” Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding.  “He’s one of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free and advanced; a perfect firebrand.  In fact, my dear child, I don’t know which of you makes my hair stand on end most.”  And with that introductory hint, she left the pair forthwith to their own devices.

Mrs. Dewsbury was right.  It took those two but little time to feel quite at home with one another.  Built of similar mould, each seemed instinctively to grasp what each was aiming at.  Two or three turns pacing up and down the lawn, two or three steps along the box-covered path at the side, and they read one another perfectly.  For he was true man, and she was real woman.

“Then you were at Girton?” Alan asked, as he paused with one hand on the rustic seat that looks up towards Leith Hill, and the heather-clad moorland.

“Yes, at Girton,” Herminia answered, sinking easily upon the bench, and letting one arm rest on the back in a graceful attitude of unstudied attention.  “But I didn’t take my degree,” she went on hurriedly, as one who is anxious to disclaim some too great honor thrust upon her.  “I didn’t care for the life; I thought it cramping.  You see, if we women are ever to be free in the world, we must have in the end a freeman’s education.  But the education at Girton made only a pretence at freedom.  At heart, our girls were as enslaved to conventions as any girls elsewhere.  The whole object of the training was to see just how far you could manage to push a woman’s education without the faintest danger of her emancipation.”