On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a
yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton
Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her
writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the
letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he
was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.

Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat,
thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though
vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and
harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good
complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly
prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full,
too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was
intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look
most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her
body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her
with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite
these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair,
she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from
within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does,
playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.