Beyond the City | Page 7

tall and thin and supple, with a graceful, womanly figure.
There was something stately and distinguished in her carriage,
"queenly" her friends called her, while her critics described her as
reserved and distant.
Such as it was, however, it was part and parcel of herself, for she was,
and had always from her childhood been, different from any one
around her. There was nothing gregarious in her nature. She thought
with her own mind, saw with her own eyes, acted from her own
impulse. Her face was pale, striking rather than pretty, but with two
great dark eyes, so earnestly questioning, so quick in their transitions
from joy to pathos, so swift in their comment upon every word and
deed around her, that those eyes alone were to many more attractive
than all the beauty of her younger sister. Hers was a strong, quiet soul,
and it was her firm hand which had taken over the duties of her mother,
had ordered the house, restrained the servants, comforted her father,
and upheld her weaker sister, from the day of that great misfortune.
Ida Walker was a hand's breadth smaller than Clara, but was a little

fuller in the face and plumper in the figure. She had light yellow hair,
mischievous blue eyes with the light of humor ever twinkling in their
depths, and a large, perfectly formed mouth, with that slight upward
curve of the corners which goes with a keen appreciation of fun,
suggesting even in repose that a latent smile is ever lurking at the edges
of the lips. She was modern to the soles of her dainty little high-heeled
shoes, frankly fond of dress and of pleasure, devoted to tennis and to
comic opera, delighted with a dance, which came her way only too
seldom, longing ever for some new excitement, and yet behind all this
lighter side of her character a thoroughly good, healthy-minded English
girl, the life and soul of the house, and the idol of her sister and her
father. Such was the family at number two. A peep into the remaining
villa and our introductions are complete.
Admiral Hay Denver did not belong to the florid, white-haired, hearty
school of sea-dogs which is more common in works of fiction than in
the Navy List. On the contrary, he was the representative of a much
more common type which is the antithesis of the conventional sailor.
He was a thin, hard-featured man, with an ascetic, acquiline cast of face,
grizzled and hollow-cheeked, clean-shaven with the exception of the
tiniest curved promontory of ash-colored whisker. An observer,
accustomed to classify men, might have put him down as a canon of the
church with a taste for lay costume and a country life, or as the master
of a large public school, who joined his scholars in their outdoor sports.
His lips were firm, his chin prominent, he had a hard, dry eye, and his
manner was precise and formal. Forty years of stern discipline had
made him reserved and silent. Yet, when at his ease with an equal, he
could readily assume a less quarter-deck style, and he had a fund of
little, dry stories of the world and its ways which were of interest from
one who had seen so many phases of life. Dry and spare, as lean as a
jockey and as tough as whipcord, he might be seen any day swinging
his silver-headed Malacca cane, and pacing along the suburban roads
with the same measured gait with which he had been wont to tread the
poop of his flagship. He wore a good service stripe upon his cheek, for
on one side it was pitted and scarred where a spurt of gravel knocked
up by a round- shot had struck him thirty years before, when he served
in the Lancaster gun-battery. Yet he was hale and sound, and though he

was fifteen years senior to his friend the Doctor, he might have passed
as the younger man.
Mrs. Hay Denver's life had been a very broken one, and her record
upon land represented a greater amount of endurance and self-sacrifice
than his upon the sea. They had been together for four months after
their marriage, and then had come a hiatus of four years, during which
he was flitting about between St. Helena and the Oil Rivers in a
gunboat. Then came a blessed year of peace and domesticity, to be
followed by nine years, with only a three months' break, five upon the
Pacific station, and four on the East Indian. After that was a respite in
the shape of five years in the Channel squadron, with periodical runs
home, and then again he was off to the Mediterranean for three years
and to Halifax for four. Now, at last, however, this