first brightening

She nodded approvingly at first, brightening visibly at the emancipative vision conjured up in her tired brain, but after five minutes of serious cogitation relapsed into gloom.

In fact, after the first brightening of her face at the moment of my appearance, a sort of shadow had come upon it, as though cast from a mind not at rest.

At the first brightening of the dawn Tua and Asti went out, and there, beneath them, near to the banks of a great river, which they knew for the Nile, they saw the pyramids and the temples of Napata the Golden, the southern city of Amen, and thanked the gods who had brought them here in safety.