Then she sat herself down on a low chair by the fire, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her.

Her black dress revealed her fine full throat and her white wrists, for she had an impatience of restraint anywhere, and wore frills and falls of black lace where other people would have followed the fashion in high collars and close wristbands.

What must have struck any one with an observant eye, as she sat thus, thrown into beautiful light and shade by the blaze of the wood fire, was the massiveness of the head compared with the nervous delicacy of much of the face, the thinness of the wrist, and of the long and slender foot raised on the fender.

It was perhaps the great thickness and full wave of the hair which gave the head its breadth; but the effect was singular, and would have been heavy but for the glow of the eyes, which balanced it.
She was thinking, as a _fiancee_ should, of Aldous and their marriage, which had been fixed for the end of February.

Yet not apparently with any rapturous absorption.