Page:The Downfall of the Gods (1911).pdf/44

, was of an even transparent pallor. Her deep brown eyes looked out, with steady gaze, from beneath brows tenderly curved. Her lips, full and parted, lent to her face its single note of rich colour; but for all their fulness, they were firm, and from behind them peeped two tiny sharp teeth, shaped like the poison-fangs of a snake, which broke the evenness of their fellows. But her chiefest glory was her hair. It was very dark, with a marvellous deep shadow in it, such as falls at dusk in the secret places of the woods. Dry and soft, it waved back in two rounded billows from a natural parting on her forehead. The pallor of her face enhanced its beauty; its darkness etherialised the extreme whiteness of her; and the deep, grave eyes, glancing from beneath it, borrowed therefrom an added mystery.

Those eyes were bent upon Chun as she stepped toward him, scanning him closely, and as she touched his arm, they were of a sudden clouded, till their brown was almost black. For an instant the little pale face became fixed and rigid; and across it there swept a gust of some strange magic of the emotions, or, it might be, a subtle exhalation from the well-nigh obliterated memories of lives long passed. In that instant her face—the face of a child just budding into the maturity of girlhood—became the face of a Seer, infinitely old, wise beyond the limits of human wisdom, filled with unearthly knowledge of the mysteries of life and death, of the past