At Eagle's Gorge.
By E. M. Hewitt.
ASHA was painfully ugly. The Moon and Saturn were her dominating astrological influences, and the planet of fatality had written all his signatures upon her. She was tall, thin, high-shouldered, and pale; her arms were long and bony, her movements slow and awkward. She had none of the roundness or grace of youth, and her sallow skin, rusty black hair, and hollow cheeks seemed like those of a woman prematurely old. Her dark, strangely lambent eyes, shaded by heavy brows that met above her thin nose, failed to inspire terror only because they were infinitely sad. Her lips rarely smiled, but their want of fulness betokened self-repression and strength of will rather than coldness or egotism. Silent and sensitive, the girl appeared weighed down by the consciousness of her entire lack of beauty. She walked listlessly, with downcast eyes, and she loved solitude.
Thoughtless people, afraid to scorn her ugly face, sometimes spoke of her as a witch; but Nasha had a soul so beautiful that it attached to her all things innocent and sweet. Love of the beautiful was a passion with her, and this was the secret of the power which drew to her all that might otherwise have been repelled by her unlovely face. She seemed to possess a subtle influence that made the flowers hasten to bud and blossom under her hand, so that her garden in the wild mountain pass was a marvel of colour from early spring to late autumn.
"Little children would run to her."
Dogs would show an almost human joy at the sound of her voice, and little children would leave their mothers' skirts to run to her. All women who were sad or suffering hailed her coming with delight; but no one could have told you exactly why they loved her, for they were wiser than they themselves knew. They discerned the true Nasha behind the mask of her ugliness—that mean outer garb which was but the matrix that contained the gem.
The real woman was the pure, heroic soul, the faithful, mysterious, invisible being who walked the mountains, who pondered in loneliness, who was thrilled by the music of Nature's thousand voices and the breath of Nature's thousand. perfumes. It was for a glimpse of this beneficent mystery that the children clung to her gown, the sorrowful women sought her, and the dumb creatures were glad in her presence; and but for this comradeship Nasha's indeed have been a sorry life. Home, to her, meant simply the grim, grey building, wedged between great rocks, and called the Eagle's Gorge. Her only ostensible friends were Getha, the old woman who waited upon her, and Lyoff, her Russian wolfhound. The great complex world was only accessible to her through the crowded bookshelves of the library, in the blue-ceilinged chapel, with its tawdry altar and its shabby prie-dieu, and in the mountains round her home. The castle belonged to Nasha, not because the mother, who left it her, bore her any special affection, but because the articles of the loveless marriage from which Nasha sprang stipulated that the little estate in the mountains should descend to female children, while the husband, out of his own resources, should provide for his sons. As it happened, one daughter and one son were the only offspring of the union,
