usanna drew herself up.

"Young?" she exclaimed. "A mere child? I? Good gracious, I 'm
_twenty-two_."

She said it, scanning the syllables to give them weight, and in all
good faith I think, as who should say, "I 'm fifty."

"You really can't accuse me of being young," she apodictically
pronounced. "I 'm twenty-two. Twenty-two long years--aie, Dio mio!
And I look even older. I could pass for twenty-five. If," was her
suddenly-inspired concession, "if it will afford you the least atom of
consolation, I 'll _tell_ people that I am twenty-five. _There_."

She wooed him anew with those melting eyes, and her tone was soft as a
caress.

"It is n't every man that I 'd offer to sacrifice three of the best
years of my life for--and it is n't every man that I 'd offer to tell
fibs for."

She threw back her head, and stood in an attitude to invite inspection.

"Don't I look twenty-five?" she asked. "If you had n't the honour of
my personal acquaintance, would it ever occur to you that I 'm what you
call 'a young girl'? Would n't you go about enquiring of every one,
'Who is that handsome, accomplished, and perfectly dressed woman of the
world?'"

And she made him the drollest of little quizzical moues.

In effect, with her tall and rather sumptuously developed figure, with
the humour and vivacity, the character and decision, of her face, with
the glow deep in her eyes, the graver glow beneath the mirth that
danced near their surface,--and then too, perhaps, with the unequivocal
Southern richness of her colouring: the warm white and covert rose of
her skin, the dense black of her undulating abundant hair, the sudden,
sanguine red of her lips,--I think you would have taken her for more
than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished,
nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness,
there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to
associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or
not, she looked, at any rate, a completed product; she looked
distinguished and worth while; she looked alive, alert: one in whom the
blood coursed swiftly, the spirit burned vigorously; one who would love
her pleasure, who could be wayward and provoking, but who could also be
generous and loyal; she looked high-bred, one in whom there was race,
as well as temperament and nerve.

The Commendatore, however, was a thousand miles from these
considerations.