A Struggle for a Ring — page 228: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

224 LADY ETHEL. ‘‘Ttis mine,” she cried, with a long-drawn sob—‘‘ mine, because I am his wife. Oh! give it to me.” — Then, when the passion of words and tears had worn themselves away, she went back home through the sunlit corn-fields. That evening the Countess of Pierpont, with her beauti- ful daughter, arrived. Alice saw all the ecl/a/, the cere- mony, the preparation; had the Queen of England been coming, there could not have been greater enthusiasm. It was just before dinner that she saw her, and Alice never forgot the impression made on her by that first sight of one who was certainly the fairest of her time. She was in the drawing-room, looking for a fan that the countess fancied she had left there, when the door opened, admit- ting what she thought at first sight was a vision. A tall, beautiful, golden-haired girl, who looked more like a superb lily than anything else; her dress of white silk, artistically trimmed with scarlet poppies and golden wheat ears, swept the ground; she wore a costly set of rubies—rubies that encircled her white throat and white arms, that glanced like points of flame in her golden hair. Her face was so unutterably, so wonderfully beautiful, that ‘ as Alice looked at it her lips parted and her eyes opened more widely than they had ever done before. A regally beautiful woman, with the proud bearing of an empress, - yet with the grace and sweetness of a flowér; lips on which the fate of a nation might have hung, yet sweet as the opening bud of a pomegranite; graceful, high-bred, and elegant; in all her life Alice had never ever dreamed of such a woman, She swept, with her imperial grace, up the long drawing-room, and as she watched her, Alice thought that, above all others, this brilliant woman was the very ideal of a mistress for Roseneath. Just such delicate comicbooks.