very
prominent, and narrow at the temples, was yellow in tint, but beneath it
sparkled two black eyes that were capable of emitting flames. Her face,
altogether Spanish, dark skinned, with little color and pitted by the
small-pox, attracted the eye by the beauty of its oval, whose outline,
though slightly impaired by time, preserved a finished elegance and
dignity, and regained at times its full perfection when some effort of
the soul restored its pristine purity. The most noticeable feature in
this strong face was the nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, and
so sharply curved at the middle as to give the idea of an interior
malformation; yet there was an air of indescribable delicacy about it,
and the partition between the nostrils was so thin that a rosy light
shone through it. Though the lips, which were large and curved, betrayed
the pride of noble birth, their expression was one of kindliness and
natural courtesy.

The beauty of this vigorous yet feminine face might indeed be
questioned, but the face itself commanded attention. Short, deformed,
and lame, this woman remained all the longer unmarried because the world
obstinately refused to credit her with gifts of mind. Yet there were
men who were deeply stirred by the passionate ardor of that face and its
tokens of ineffable tenderness, and who remained under a charm that was
seemingly irreconcilable with such personal defects.

She was very like her grandfather, the Duke of Casa-Real, a grandee of
Spain. At this moment, when we first see her, the charm which in earlier
days despotically grasped the soul of poets and lovers of poesy now
emanated from that head with greater vigor than at any former period of
her life, spending itself, as it were, upon the void, and expressing a
nature of all-powerful fascination over men, though it was at the same
time powerless over destiny.

When her eyes turned from the glass globes, where they were gazing at
the fish they saw not, she raised them with a despairing action, as if
to invoke the skies. Her sufferings seemed of a kind that are told to
God alone. The silence was unbroken save for the chirp of crickets and
the shrill whirr of a few locusts, coming from the little garden then
hotter than an oven, and the dull sound of silver and plates, and the
moving of chairs in the adjoining room, where a servant was preparing to
serve the dinner.

At this moment, the distressed woman roused herself from her abstraction
and l