Excerpt from The Life Sentence The man sat at the far end reading a paper, and half concealed behind it; the girl leant forward in her seat, looking through the window, and the sun fell on the pastel blue of her dress and seemed to linger in her cloud of bright hair, under the velvet hat, as if it found her the prettiest thing to rest upon and wished to caress her. And she was so pretty, this girl, although her nose was not the clas sic shape, nor any of her features perfect. The burnished mass of her hair against the silky whiteness of her skin, the blue eyes like great clear pools, with their dark lashes, under their soft brown brows, and the colour of the mouth like a damask rose, these were the birthday gifts of Nature to her at the commence ment of her sixteenth year. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.