Miss Brown - v. 2 Author:Vernon Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. When Mrs Macgregor had gone up-staira to rest before dinner on their arrival at Wotton Hall, Hamlin took Miss Brown round the huge, deserted-lookin... more »g house, which his grandfather had built on returning from Jamaica. It was like an Italian villa, with vaulted rooms, gilded and stuccoed, marble floors, and terraced windows; the furniture was all of the Napoleonic period; nothing could be more dignified or sadder. When Hamlin had shown her the large drawing-rooms, the library, the room which had been the play-room when he was a child, he took Anne into the large Palladian hall, and showed her the innumerable portraits of ladies and gentlemen in armour, and ruffs,and bobwigs, and powder, hanging all round, —his ancestors ever since his family had left England in the civil wars. Anne looked at them shyly. They were mostly indifferently painted and vapid — affected, like all old portraits by mediocre painters; but it seemed to her that in most of these gentlemen, with peaked beards on their Vandyck lace, or horse-hair wigs, or carefully powdered hair tied back in silk bags, she could recognise a resemblance to the man by her side—the same delicate, handsome features, the same fair, almost beardless complexion, the same gentle, melancholy, slightly ironical expression: and never did the real meaning of Hamlin's marriage with her come clearer before her mind than when, in that silent hall, surrounded by all those portraits of his ancestors, she suddenly saw herself and him reflected in one of the long dim mirrors; she, so tall and strong, so powerful of bone and muscle, with her strange, half-southern, half-Jewish, andalmost half-Ethiopian beauty, by the side of that slight, fair, pale, aristocratic man, with features sharp like those of a high-bred race-horse, nervous ...« less