The Argosy — page 338: what you’re looking at

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

324 A Secret of the Sea. You will find that I am a bird of very homely plumage,” replied Gerald, with a smile. ‘‘ Your father has been drawing on a too lively imagination. Iam afraid that his rara avis will prove to be nothing more wonderful than our familiar friend—the goose.” “What a superb creature!” was Gerald’s thought, as he sat down opposite Miriam ; and that was the right phrase to apply to her. Miss Byrne was at this time close upon her twenty-second birthday. Her beauty was of an altogether Eastern type. Hardly anyone who met Miriam in the street took her to be an English girl; while to those who knew both her and her father it was a constant source of wonder how “old Peter ” could come to have for his daughter a girl so totally un- like him in every possible way. But Byrne’s wife, who died when her daughter was quite an infant, had been a beautiful woman, and Minam more than inherited her mother’s good looks. People, knowing the family, averred that she was an exact counterpart of her grand- mother : a lovely Roumanian Jewess, who had been brought over to England in the train of an Austrian lady of rank, and having found a husband here, had never gone back. Eyes and hair of the blackest had Miriam Byrme. Large, liquid eyes, shaded with long, black lashes, and arched with delicate, well-defined brows ; hair that fell in a thick, heavy mass to her very waist. Tints of the damask rose glowed through the dusky clearness of her cheeks. Her forehead was low and broad as that of some antique Venus. Her mouth was ripe and full, and might have looked somewhat coarse had it not been relieved by her finely-cut nose with its delicate nostrils. She had on, this evening, a long, trailing dress of violet velvet, which harmonised admirably with her dusky loveliness—a rich, heavy-looking dress by . gaslight, but one which daylight would have shown to be faded and frayed in many places. It had, in fact, at one time been a stage dress, and as such, had been worn by Miss Kesteven of the Royal Westminster Theatre, when playing the heroine of one of Sardou’s clever dramas. The necklace of pearls, with ear-rings to match, which Miriam wore this evening were also of stage parentage, Lut they looked so much like the real thing that no one, save an expert, could have told without handling them that they were nothing better than clever shams. The one ring, too, which she wore—a hoop of diamonds—on her some- what large, but well-shaped, hand, was not more genuine than her pearl mecklace. It had been bought for a few shillings in the Burlington Arcade ; but it flashed famously in the gaslight: and as one cannot well take off a Jady’s ring in order to examine it, it answered its purpose just as well as if it had cost a hundred guineas. But we must not be too hard on Miriam. No doubt she was as fond of a little finery as most of her sisters are at two-and-twenty, but, in the present case, all these sham trinkets had been assumed by her at her father’s wish, and ‘‘for a certain purpose,” as the old man said. GONMGIOO SS (CO)