She walked with a
certain easy undulation, in which there were both strength and grace;
and though she could barely have been called young, none would have
dared to say that she was past maturity. Features which had been coldly
perfect and hard in early youth, and which might grow sharp in old age,
were smoothed and rounded in the full fruit-time of life's summer. As
the gold deepened in the mellow air, and tinged the lady's hair and
eyes, it wrought in her face changes of which she knew nothing. The
beauty of a white marble statue suddenly changed to burnished gold
might be beauty still, but of different expression and meaning. There
is always something devilish in the too great profusion of precious
metal--something that suggests greed, spoil, gain, and all that he
lives for who strives for wealth; and sometimes, by the mere absence of
gold or silver, there is dignity, simplicity, even solemnity.
Above the setting sun, tens of thousands of little clouds, as light and
fleecy as swan's-down, some dazzling bright, some rosy-coloured, some,
far to eastward, already purple, streamed across the pale sky in the
mystic figure of a vast wing, as if some great archangel hovered below
the horizon, pointing one jewelled pinion to the firmament, the other
down and unseen in his low flight. Just above the feathery oak trees,
behind which the sun had dipped, long streamers of red and yellow and
more imperial purple shot out to right and left. Above the moat's broad
water, the quick dark May-flies chased one another, in dashes of
straight lines, through the rosy haze, and as the sinking sun shot a
last farewell glance between the oak trees on the knoll, the lady stood
still and turned her smooth features to the light.
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