While Cohen talked on for a moment or two, and Zillah’s eyes were fixed upon her brother-in-law, Tom Hammond’s gaze was riveted upon the lovely girl.
Every feature of her beautiful face became photographed on his brain. Had he been a clever artist, he could have gone to his studio and have flung with burning, brilliant haste her face upon his canvas.
He thought of Zenobia as he looked upon her brow. He wondered if ever two such wide, black, lustrous eyes had ever shone in the face of a woman before, or whether a female soul had ever before been mirrored in such eyes.
Her mouth was not the large, wide feature so often seen in women of her race, but of exquisite lines, with ripe, full lips, as brilliant in colour as the most glowing coral. Her eyes were fringed with the blackest, finest, silkiest lashes. Her hair was raven in hue and wondrous in its wealth.
He realized, in that first moment of full gazing upon her, how faded every other female face must ever seem beside her glorious beauty. With a strange freak of mental conjuring, Madge Finisterre and that interrupted tete-a-tete rose up before him, and a sudden sense of relief swept over him that George Carlyon had returned at the moment that he did.
“It is all so strange, so wonderful to me, what I have seen and heard here,” he jerked out as Cohen finished his explanation.
Hammond spoke to the beautiful girl, whose great lustrous eyes had suddenly come back to his face.
For a moment or two longer he voiced his admiration of the separate pieces of finished work, and spoke of his own growing interest in the Jewish race.
The great black eyes that gazed upwards into his, grew liquid with the evident emotion that filled the soul of the beautiful girl. With the frank, hearty, simple gesture of the perfectly unconventional woman, she held forth her hand to Hammond as she said:
“It is so good of you, sir, to speak thus of my brother-in-law’s work and of our race. There are few who speak kindly of us. Even though, as a nation, you English give our poor persecuted people sanctuary, yet there are few who care for us or speak kindly of us, and fewer still who speak kindly to us.”