This maid began early to show herself in many ways remarkable.

While yet a child she grew tall, lithe, agile; her eyes were large and black, and rolled and sparkled if she but turned to answer to her name.

Her pale yellow forehead, low and shapely, with the jet hair above it, the heavily pencilled eyebrows and long lashes below, the faint red tinge that blushed with a kind of cold passion through the clear yellow skin of the cheek, the fulness of the red, voluptuous lips and the roundness of her perfect neck, gave her, even at fourteen, a barbaric and magnetic beauty, that startled the beholder like an unexpected drawing out of a jewelled sword.

Such a type could have sprung only from high Latin ancestry on the one side and--we might venture--Jaloff African on the other.

To these charms of person she added mental acuteness, conversational adroitness, concealed cunning, and noiseless but visible strength of will; and to these, that rarest of gifts in one of her tincture, the purity of true womanhood.
At fourteen a necessity which had been parleyed with for two years or more became imperative, and Aurore's maid was taken from her.
Explanation is almost superfluous.