childlike simplicity
can have intuition of what most touches a strong man. She was less
like the portrait now than a moment earlier; her lips, just parting in
a little half-longing, half-troubled smile, were like dark rose leaves
damp with dew, her eyelids drooped at the corners for an instant, and
the translucent little nostrils quivered at the mysterious thrill that
stirred her maiden being.

The two young people had not known each other quite a year, for she
had never seen Severi till she had left the convent to go out into
society and to take her place at her widowed father's table as his
only child; but at their first meeting Giovanni had felt that of all
women he had known, none but she had ever called his nature to hers
with the longing cry of the natural mate. At first she was quite
unconscious of her power, and for a long time he looked in vain for
the slightest outward sign that she was moved when she saw him making
his way to her in a crowded drawing-room, or coming upon her suddenly
out of doors when she was walking in the villa with her old governess,
the excellent Madame Bernard, or riding in the Campagna with her
father. Giovanni's duties were light, and he had plenty of time to
spare, and his pertinacity in finding her would have been compromising
if he had been less ingeniously tactful. It was by no means easy to
meet her in society either, for, in spite of recent social
developments, Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated
political mythology of Blacks and Whites, and strictly avoided the
families he persisted in calling 'Liberals,' on the ground that his
father had called them so in 1870, when he was a small boy. It was not
until he had bored himself to extinction in the conscientious effort
to take the girl out, that he appealed to his sister-in-law to help
him, though he knew that neither she nor his brother was truly
clerical at heart. Even then, if it had been clear to him that
Giovanni Severi had made up his mind to marry Angela if he married at
all, the Prince would have forced himself to bear agonies of boredom
night after night, rather than entrust his daughter to the Marchesa;
but such an idea had never entered his head, and he would have scouted
the suggestion that Angela would ever dare to encourage a young man of
whom he had not formally approved; and while she was meeting Giovanni
almost daily, and dancing with him almost every evening, her father
was slowly negotiating an appr