w something deeper in the strange expression
which had lurked in her face while he talked to her. At first he had
been dazzled by her blooming beauty, to which the lapse of weeks had
only added splendor; then he had seen a heavier ray in the light of her
eye--a sinister intimation of sadness and bitterness. It was the outward
mark of her sacrificed ideal. Her eyes grew cold as she looked at her
husband, and when, after a moment, she turned them upon Rowland, they
struck him as intensely tragical. He felt a singular mixture of sympathy
and dread; he wished to give her a proof of friendship, and yet it
seemed to him that she had now turned her face in a direction where
friendship was impotent to interpose. She half read his feelings,
apparently, and she gave a beautiful, sad smile. "I hope we may never
meet again!" she said. And as Rowland gave her a protesting look--"You
have seen me at my best. I wish to tell you solemnly, I was sincere! I
know appearances are against me," she went on quickly. "There is a great
deal I can't tell you. Perhaps you have guessed it; I care very little.
You know, at any rate, I did my best. It would n't serve; I was beaten
and broken; they were stronger than I. Now it 's another affair!"

"It seems to me you have a large chance for happiness yet," said
Rowland, vaguely.

"Happiness? I mean to cultivate rapture; I mean to go in for bliss
ineffable! You remember I told you that I was, in part, the world's and
the devil's. Now they have taken me all. It was their choice; may they
never repent!"

"I shall hear of you," said Rowland.

"You will hear of me. And whatever you do hear, remember this: I was
sincere!"

Prince Casamassima had approached, and Rowland looked at him with a
good deal of simple compassion as a part of that "world" against which
Christina had launched her mysterious menace. It was obvious that he
was a good fellow, and that he could not, in the nature of things, be
a positively bad husband; but his distinguished inoffensiveness only
deepened the infelicity of Christina's situation by depriving her
defiant attitude of the sanction of relative justice. So long as she had
been free to choose, she had esteemed him: but from the moment she was
forced to marry him she had detested him. Rowland read in the young
man's elastic Italian mask a profound consciousness of all this; and
as he found there also a record of other curious things--of pride, of
temper, of bigotry, of an im