Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/349

 There was in her face that lustrous dazzle to which the Latin poet, perhaps, refers when he speaks of the—

"Nitor Splendentis Pario marmore purius . . . Et voltus, niminm lubricus adspici,"

and which an English poet, with the less sensuous but more spiritual imagination of northern genius, has described in lines that an English reader may be pleased to see rescued from oblivion,—

"Her face was like the milky way i' the sky, A meeting of gentle lights without a name." (Suckling)

The eyes so purely bright, the exquisite harmony of colouring between the dark (not too dark) hair and the ivory of the skin; such sweet radiance in the lip when it broke into a smile. And it was said that in her maiden day, before Caroline Lyndsay became Marchioness of Montfort, that smile was the most joyous thing imaginable. Absurd now; you would not think it, but that stately lady had been a wild, fanciful girl, with the merriest laugh and the quickest tear, filling the air round her with April sunshine. Certainly, no beings ever yet lived the life Nature intended them to live, nor had fair play for heart and mind, who contrived, by hook or by crook, to marry the wrong person!

CHAPTER VIII.

The interior of the great house.—The British Constitution at home in a family party.

Great was the family gathering that Christmas-tide at Montfort Court. Thither flocked the cousins of the House in all degrees and of various ranks. From dukes, who had nothing left to wish for that kings and cousinhoods can give, to briefless barristers and aspiring cornets, of equally good blood with the dukes,—the superb family united its motley scions. Such reunions were frequent: they belonged to the hereditary policy of the House of Vipont. On this occasion the muster of the clan was more significant than usual; there was a "CRISES" in the constitutional history of the British empire. A new Government had been suddenly formed