The girl looked at a face which was not less remarkable for its beauty than for its expression of weariness and sorrow, at a figure not more noticeable for its grace and suppleness than for the languor and listlessness which every movement betrayed.
Margaret Hungerford was tall, but not so tall as to be remarked for her height; and her figure, rounded and lithe, had still much of the slightness of girlhood remaining. Her face was not perfect; the forehead was too high and too heavy for ideal beauty; there was not enough colour in the clear pale cheek; there was not enough richness in the outline of the delicate mouth. Her face was one in which intellect ruled, and thus its beauty served a master which is pitiless in its exactions, and wears out the softness and the fineness and the tinting in a service which is not gentle.
But it was a beautiful face for all that, more than beautiful for those who looked beyond the deep dark colouring of the large gray eyes, deep-set under the finely-marked brows; who looked for the spirit in their light, for the calm and courage which lent them the limpid placid beaming which was their ordinary characteristic. It was not a perfect face; but it had that which very few perfect faces possess--the capacity for expressing feeling, intelligence, the nobler passions, and utter forgetfulness of self.
To look at Margaret Hungerford was to feel that, however faulty her character might be, it at least was noble, and to know that vanity had no share in an organisation which had no place for anything small, whether good or evil. It was a magnanimous resolute face--not strong, in any sense implying roughness, hardness, or self-assertion, but evincing a large capacity of loving and working and suffering.
And she had loved and worked and suffered. The bloom that was wanting to her pure fair cheek, which touched too faintly and grudgingly her small, well-curved, but ascetic lips, had vanished from her heart as well; the slight white fingers, too thin for beauty,--though the hands, clasped over her breast as she lay still with closed eyes, were curiously small and perfectly shaped,--had been unsparingly used in many and various kinds of toil in the new land, which had been wild and rough indeed when she had come there.
The girl looked at her admiringly, and with a sort of pity, for which she had no reason to give to herself except that her mistress was a widow. Explanation enough, she would have said, and naturally; and still, there was something in the face which Rose Moore felt, in her untaught, instinctive, but very acute fashion, had been there longer than three months, which was the exact period since Mrs. Hungerford's husband had died.
Who was she going to? she thought; and did she like going home? and what was she leaving behind? Not her husband's grave, the girl knew, and felt the knowledge as an Irish peasant would feel it. No, she had not even that consolation; for her husband, who had been a member of one of the earliest-formed exploring parties who had undertaken to investigate the capacities of the unknown new continent, had been killed in the Australian bush. It was better not to think what the fate of his remains had been, better that it was not known.
What, then, was this pale young widow, who looked as though her sorrow far antedated her weeds, leaving behind her? Rose Moore was not destined to know. What was she going to? the girl wondered. In the short time she had been with her, Mrs. Hungerford's kindness had been accompanied with strict reserve, and Rose had learned no more than that she was returning, probably, to her father's home; but of even that she was not certain.
Thus the "lone woman" seemed pitiable to the gay and handsome Irish girl, and the thought of it interfered with her visions of "home," and her exultation in the money she had to take thither, and the love she was going to find.
Pitiable indeed she was.