e of her soft form full of the poetry
and beauty both of repose and motion.

Her complexion was pale as alabaster; even her cheeks, except when
some sudden tide of passion, or some strong emotion sent the impetuous
blood coursing thither more wildly than its wont, were colorless, but
there was nothing sallow or sickly, nothing of that which is
ordinarily understood by the word pallid, in their clear, warm,
transparent purity; nothing, in a word, of that lividness which the
French, with more accuracy than we, distinguish from the healthful
paleness which is so beautiful in southern women.

Her hair, profuse almost to redundance, was perfectly black, but of
that warm and lustrous blackness which is probably the hue expressed
by the ancient Greeks by the term hyacinthine, and which in certain
lights has a purplish metallic gloss playing over it, like the varying
reflections on the back of the raven. Her strongly defined, and nearly
straight eyebrows, were dark as night, as were the long, silky lashes
which were displayed in clear relief against the fair, smooth cheek,
as the lids lay closed languidly over the bright blue eyes.

It was a minute or two before Melanie moved or gave any symptoms of
recovering from her fainting fit, and during those minutes the lips of
Raoul had been pressed so often and so warmly to those of the fair
insensible, that had any spark of perception remained to her, the fond
and lingering pressure could not have failed to call the "purple
light of love," to her ingenuous face.

At length a long, slow shiver ran through the form of the senseless
girl, and thrilled, like the touch of the electric wire, every nerve
in St. Renan's body.

Then the soft rosy lips were unclosed, and forth rushed the ambrosial
breath in a long, gentle sigh, and the beautiful bust heaved and
undulated, like the bosom of the calm sea, when the first breathings
of the coming storm steal over it, and wake, as if by sympathy, its
deep pulsations.

He clasped her closer to his heart, half fearful that when life and
perfect consciousness should be restored to that exquisite frame, it
would start from his embrace, if not in anger or alarm, at least as if
from a forbidden and illicit pleasure.

Gradually a faint rosy hue, slight as the earliest blushes of the
morning sky, crept over her white cheeks, and deepened into a rich
passionate flush; and at the same moment the azure-tinctured lids were
unclosed slowly, and the lar