Having taken off her gown and white kerchief, she drew a key from the large pocket that hung outside her petticoat, and, unlocking one of the lower drawers in the chest, reached from it two short bits of wax candle—­secretly bought at Treddleston—­and stuck them in the two brass sockets.  Then she drew forth a bundle of matches and lighted the candles; and last of all, a small red-framed shilling looking-glass, without blotches.  It was into this small glass that she chose to look first after seating herself.  She looked into it, smiling and turning her head on one side, for a minute, then laid it down and took out her brush and comb from an upper drawer.  She was going to let down her hair, and make herself look like that picture of a lady in Miss Lydia Donnithorne’s dressing-room.  It was soon done, and the dark hyacinthine curves fell on her neck.  It was not heavy, massive, merely rippling hair, but soft and silken, running at every opportunity into delicate rings.  But she pushed it all backward to look like the picture, and form a dark curtain, throwing into relief her round white neck.  Then she put down her brush and comb and looked at herself, folding her arms before her, still like the picture.  Even the old mottled glass couldn’t help sending back a lovely image, none the less lovely because Hetty’s stays were not of white satin—­such as I feel sure heroines must generally wear—­but of a dark greenish cotton texture.

Oh yes!  She was very pretty.  Captain Donnithorne thought so.  Prettier than anybody about Hayslope—­prettier than any of the ladies she had ever seen visiting at the Chase—­indeed it seemed fine ladies were rather old and ugly—­and prettier than Miss Bacon, the miller’s daughter, who was called the beauty of Treddleston.  And Hetty looked at herself to-night with quite a different sensation from what she had ever felt before; there was an invisible spectator whose eye rested on her like morning on the flowers.  His soft voice was saying over and over again those pretty things she had heard in the wood; his arm was round her, and the delicate rose-scent of his hair was with her still.  The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.

But Hetty seemed to have made up her mind that something was wanting, for she got up and reached an old black lace scarf out of the linen-press, and a pair of large ear-rings out of the sacred drawer from which she had taken her candles.  It was an old old scarf, full of rents, but it would make a becoming border round her shoulders, and set off the whiteness of her upper arm.  And she would take out the little ear-rings she had in her ears—­oh, how her aunt had scolded her for having her ears bored!—­and put in those large ones.  They were but coloured glass and gilding, but if you didn’t know what they were made of, they looked just as well as what the ladies wore.  And so she sat down again, with the large ear-rings in her ears, and the black lace scarf adjusted round her shoulders.  She looked down at her arms:  no arms could be prettier down to a little way below the elbow—­they were white and plump, and dimpled to match her cheeks; but towards the wrist, she thought with vexation that they were coarsened by butter-making and other work that ladies never did.