semblance.
The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been originally designed
for such high dames as the one now looking on me from the canvas, had
fallen to baser uses, wearing country clothes, sitting on the shaft and
holding the reins of a mule cart, to bring home a lodger. Perhaps an
actual link subsisted; perhaps some scruple of the delicate flesh that
was once clothed upon with the satin and brocade of the dead lady, now
winced at the rude contact of Felipe's frieze.

The first light of the morning shone full upon the portrait, and, as I
lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency;
its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one
after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign
and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she
were alive, I should love her. Day after day the double knowledge of her
wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer. She came to be the heroine
of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and sufficiently
rewarded, crimes. She cast a dark shadow on my fancy; and when I was out
in the free air of heaven, taking vigorous exercise and healthily
renewing the current of my blood, it was often a glad thought to me that
my enchantress was safe in the grave, her wand of beauty broken, her lips
closed in silence, her philtre spilt. And yet I had a half-lingering
terror that she might not be dead after all, but re-arisen in the body of
some descendant.

Felipe served my meals in my own apartment; and his resemblance to the
portrait haunted me. At times it was not; at times, upon some change of
attitude or flash of expression, it would leap out upon me like a ghost.
It was above all in his ill tempers that the likeness triumphed. He
certainly liked me; he was proud of my notice, which he sought to engage
by many simple and childlike devices; he loved to sit close before my
fire, talking his broken talk or singing his odd, endless, wordless
songs, and sometimes drawing his hand over my clothes with an
affectionate manner of caressing that never failed to cause in me an
embarrassment of which I was ashamed. But for all that, he was capable
of flashes of causeless anger and fits of sturdy sullenness. At a word
of reproof, I have seen him upset the dish of which I was about to eat,
and this not surreptitiously, but with defiance; and similarly at a hint
of inquisition. I was not unnaturally cu