shyness, and his very love, his very respect for your superiority, do not
allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is true,
have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen. He
has not at present--few men have. But what Cimon would not be refined by
so fair an Iphigenia? Such frivolities as he now shows belong but to
youth and inexperience of life. Happy the brother who could see his
sister the wife of Frank Hazeldean."

The marchesa leaned her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage
was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate
widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her
unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul; so
had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character
been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the
equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to
which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her--not without design on
the part of the count, who though grasping, was not miserly, and who by
precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one time, and refusals of
all aid at another, had involved her in debt in order to retain his hold
on her; so utterly painful and humiliating to a woman of her pride and
her birth was the station that she held in the world,--that in marriage
she saw liberty, life, honour, self-redemption; and these thoughts, while
they compelled her to co-operate with the schemes by which the count, on
securing to himself a bride, was to bestow on herself a dower, also
disposed her now to receive with favour Randal Leslie's pleadings on
behalf of his friend.

The advocate saw that he had made an impression, and with the marvellous
skill which his knowledge of those natures that engaged his study
bestowed on his intelligence, he continued to improve his cause by such