Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 237: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XIX ELIZABETH’S REFLECTIONS It was seven o’clock in the morning, and Elizabeth Paton was half-reclining in a large armchair, in her elegantly furnished chamber at Stamford Manor. She had not as yet commenced her toilet. The luxuriant masses of her long dark hair hung negligently down upon her bare shoulders, — those shoulders which were of such polished whiteness, and so symmetrically modelled. She was absorbed in the deepest thought. A book, which she had taken from the table near, was held unregarded in the fair hand on which Count Christoval’s lips had been so fervidly pressed on the preceding evening. Her whole attitude, her look, and the complete abandonment of her form to the influence of that reverie showed a profound and serious communing with her own heart. Elizabeth Paton was at that moment a splendid model for the study of a painter or a sculptor. That form, if transferred to the canvas in its semi-nudity and with its superb contours, would have seemed to breathe with a real life, notwithstanding the profound pensiveness which the entire figure denoted. If copied in marble, it would have appeared to glow with vital warmth, notwithstanding that the statue would be as motionless as its living original at that moment. Ah! and the poet, too, might have imbibed inspirations from the contemplation of that superb creature, in the bloom of her womanhood, but every lineament of whose countenance and every contour of whose shape retained the virginal freshness of youth. There was a soit- ness now in the eyes that had lately been wont to look penetratingly, almost with a bold hardihood; there was a softness, too, in the expression of that countenance which 220 GEomichbooks (EO