their expression was one of kindliness and natural courtesy.

The beauty of this vigorous yet feminine face might indeed be
questioned, but the face itself commanded attention. Short, deformed,
and lame, this woman remained all the longer unmarried because the
world obstinately refused to credit her with gifts of mind. Yet there
were men who were deeply stirred by the passionate ardor of that face
and its tokens of ineffable tenderness, and who remained under a charm
that was seemingly irreconcilable with such personal defects.

She was very like her grandfather, the Duke of Casa-Real, a grandee of
Spain. At this moment, when we first see her, the charm which in
earlier days despotically grasped the soul of poets and lovers of
poesy now emanated from that head with greater vigor than at any
former period of her life, spending itself, as it were, upon the void,
and expressing a nature of all-powerful fascination over men, though
it was at the same time powerless over destiny.

When her eyes turned from the glass globes, where they were gazing at
the fish they saw not, she raised them with a despairing action, as if
to invoke the skies. Her sufferings seemed of a kind that are told to
God alone. The silence was unbroken save for the chirp of crickets and
the shrill whirr of a few locusts, coming from the little garden then
hotter than an oven, and the dull sound of silver and plates, and the
moving of chairs in the adjoining room, where a servant was preparing
to serve the dinner.

At this moment, the distressed woman roused herself from her
abstraction and listened attentively; she took her handkerchief, wiped
away her tears, attempted to smile, and so resolutely effaced the