d each
other simultaneously,--she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put a
rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman
no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this
savage domicile.

In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her
eyes had first given him the embarrassment that kept him dumb in
her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely
ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes--the eyes of the woman
born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet
always inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise--that told him
first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm
grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet
quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the
flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter
her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the
average of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; instead
there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely
low.

"Madame; pardon! I--I--was awakened by music, and--"

Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature of
the recontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to a
bolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.

"I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame's
permission, I shall return to earth."

His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied
noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to
gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully
understand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, not
a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count
Victor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt
that there were lines upon his face betraying him.

"I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance," she said at
last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running
on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English
was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain
melody but adding to the charm of her accent.

Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by this
_sang froid_ where he might naturally have looked for perturbation.

"Pardon! I d