"Not extravagant, and not positively poor, but dependent."

"Then we have him," said the count, composedly. "If his assistance be
worth buying, we can bid high for it. /Sur mon ame/, I never yet knew
money fail with any man who was both worldly and dependent. I put him
and myself in your hands."

Thus saying, the count opened the door, and conducted his sister with
formal politeness to her carriage. He then returned, reseated himself,
and mused in silence. As he did so, the muscles of his countenance
relaxed. The levity of the Frenchman fled from his visage, and in his
eye, as it gazed abstractedly into space, there was that steady depth so
remarkable in the old portraits of Florentine diplomatist or Venetian
Oligarch. Thus seen, there was in that face, despite all its beauty,
something that would have awed back even the fond gaze of love,--
something hard, collected, inscrutable, remorseless. But this change of
countenance did not last long. Evidently thought, though intense for the
moment, was not habitual to the man; evidently he had lived the life
which takes all things lightly,--so he rose with a look of fatigue, shook
and stretched himself, as if to cast off, or grow out of, an unwelcome
and irksome mood. An hour afterwards, the Count of Peschiera was
charming all eyes, and pleasing all ears, in the saloon of a high-born
beauty, whose acquaintance he had made at Vienna, and whose charms,
according to that old and never-truth-speaking oracle, Polite Scandal,
were now said to have attracted to London the brilliant foreigner.




CHAPTER III.