I could then watch her varying moods more attentively—the tender solicitude and earnest affection she evinced for her mother:—the piquant coquetry with which she treated me.
She had such dear little, characteristic ways about her—ways that were quite peculiar to herself.
I got to know them all.
When she was specially interested in anything that one was saying, she would lean forwards, with a deep, reflective look in her clear grey eyes, in rapt attention, resting her little dimpled chin on her bent hand:—when she disagreed with something you said, she would make such a pretty quaint moue, tossing her head defiantly, and raise her curving eyebrows in astonishment that you should dare to differ from her.
She seldom laughed—I hate to hear girls continually giggling and guffawing at the merest nothings so long as they proceed from male lips!
When Min laughed, her laughter was just like the rippling of silvery music and of the most catching, contagious nature. She generally only smiled, at even the most humorous incidents; and her smile was the sweetest I ever saw in anyone. It lit up her whole face with merriment, giving the grey eyes the most bewitching expression, and bringing into prominent notice a tiny, dear little dimple in her chin, which you might not have previously observed.
Her smile it was that completed my captivation, that first time that I saw her in church and lost my heart in a moment:—her smile was ever and always her greatest charm.
Of course I remember all her little darling ways and coquetries.
Love is a great master of the art of mnemonics, and might be quoted by Mr Stokes as one of the greatest “aids to memory” that is known.
Trifling trivialities, by others passed by unobserved, are graphically jotted down with indelible ink in his cordal note-book—