Notwithstanding the glance of intelligence which Captain Granville had remarked, and which we had previously stated to have been directed by Miss Montgomerie to her captor a few hours before, there was nothing in her manner daring dinner to convey the semblance of a prepossession.  True, that in the tumultuous glow of gratified vanity and dawning love, Gerald Grantham had executed a toilet into which, with a view to the improvement of the advantage he imagined himself to have gained, all the justifiable coquetry of personal embellishment had been thrown; but neither the handsome blue uniform with its glittering epaulette, nor the beautiful hair on which more than usual pains had been bestowed, nor the sparkling of his dark eye, nor the expression of a cheek, rendered doubly animated by excitement, nor the interestingly displayed arm en echarpe—­none of these attractions, we repeat, seemed to claim even a partial notice from her they were intended to captivate.  Cold, colourless, passionless, Miss Montgomerie met him with the calmness of an absolute stranger; and when, with the recollection of the indescribable look she had bestowed upon him glowing at his heart, Gerald again sought in her eyes some trace of the expression that had stirred every vein into transport, he found there indifference the most complete.  How great his mortification was we will not venture to describe, but the arch and occasional raillery of his lively cousin, Julia D’Egville, seemed to denote most plainly that the conqueror and the conquered had exchanged positions.

Nor was this surprising; Miss Montgomerie’s travelling habit had been discarded for the more decorative ornaments of a dinner toilet, in which, however, the most marked simplicity was preserved.  A plain white muslin dress gave full developement to a person, which was of a perfection that no dress could have disguised.  It was the bust of a Venus, united to a form, to create which would have taxed the imaginative powers of a Praxiteles—­a form so faultlessly moulded that every movement presented some new and unpremeditated grace.  What added to the surpassing richness of her beauty was her hair, which, black, glossy, and of eastern luxuriance, and seemingly disdaining the girlishness of curls, reposed in broad Grecian bands, across a brow, the intellectual expression of which they contributed to form.  Yet, never did woman exhibit in her person and face, more opposite extremes of beauty.  If the one was strikingly characteristic of warmth, the other was no less indicative of coldness.  Fair, even to paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed by the observer, but certainly unallied to softness.  Still was she beautiful—­coldly, classically, beautiful—­eminently calculated to inspire passion, but seemingly incapable of feeling it.