or power or robustness.

On his return, he had lost, it is true, no jot of his gracefulness or
ease of demeanor, but he had shot up and expanded into a tall,
broad-shouldered, round-chested, thin-flanked man, with a complexion
burned to the darkest hue of which a European skin is susceptible, and
which perhaps required the aid of the full soft blue eye to prove it
to be European--with a glance as quick, as penetrating, and at the
same time as calm and steady as that of the eagle when he gazes
undazzled at the noontide splendor.

His hair had been cut short to wear beneath the casque which was still
carried by cavaliers, and had grown so much darker that this
alteration alone would have gone far to defy the recognition of his
friends. He wore a thick dark moustache on his upper lip, and a large
_royal_, which we should nowadays call an _imperial_, on his chin.

The whole aspect and expression of face, moreover, was altered, even
in a greater degree than his complexion, or his person. All the quick,
sparkling play and mobility of feature, the sharp flash of rapidly
succeeding sentiments, and strong emotions, expressed on the ingenuous
face, as soon as they were conceived within the brain--all these had
disappeared completely--disappeared, never to return.

The grave composure of the thoughtful, self-possessed, experienced
soldier, sufficient in himself to meet every emergency, every
alternation of fortune, had succeeded the imaginative, impulsive ardor
of the impetuous, gallant boy.

There was a shadow, too, a heavy shadow of something more than
thought--for it was, in truth, deep, real, heartfelt melancholy,
which lent an added gloom to the cold fixity of eye and lip, which had
obliterated all the gay and gleeful flashes which used, from moment to
moment, to light up the countenance so speaking and so frank in its
disclosures.

Yet it would have been difficult to say whether Raoul de St. Renan,
grave, dark and sorrowful as he now showed, was not both a handsomer
and more attractive person than he had been in his earlier days, as
the gay and thoughtless Viscount de Douarnez.

There was a depth of feeling, as well as of thought, now perceptible
in the pensive brow and calm eye; and if the ordinary expression of
those fine and placid lineaments was fixed and cold, that coldness and
rigidity vanished when his face was lighted up by a smile, as quickly
as the thin ice of an April morning melts away before the first
g