Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted—­never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it.  The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache.  She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead.  Her expression—­bright, frank, and intelligent—­appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.  To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model—­to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended—­was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.

“Mr. Hartright?” said the lady interrogatively, her dark face lighting up with a smile, and softening and growing womanly the moment she began to speak.  “We resigned all hope of you last night, and went to bed as usual.  Accept my apologies for our apparent want of attention; and allow me to introduce myself as one of your pupils.  Shall we shake hands?  I suppose we must come to it sooner or later—­and why not sooner?”

These odd words of welcome were spoken in a clear, ringing, pleasant voice.  The offered hand—­rather large, but beautifully formed—­was given to me with the easy, unaffected self-reliance of a highly-bred woman.  We sat down together at the breakfast-table in as cordial and customary a manner as if we had known each other for years, and had met at Limmeridge House to talk over old times by previous appointment.

“I hope you come here good-humouredly determined to make the best of your position,” continued the lady.  “You will have to begin this morning by putting up with no other company at breakfast than mine.  My sister is in her own room, nursing that essentially feminine malady, a slight headache; and her old governness, Mrs. Vesey, is charitably attending on her with restorative tea.  My uncle, Mr. Fairlie, never joins us at any of our meals:  he is an invalid, and keeps bachelor state in his own apartments.  There is nobody else in the house but me.  Two young ladies have been staying here, but they went away yesterday, in despair; and no wonder.  All through their visit (in consequence of Mr. Fairlie’s invalid condition) we produced no such convenience in the house as a flirtable, danceable, small-talkable creature of the male sex; and the consequence was, we did nothing but quarrel, especially at dinner-time.