ty, do
not allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is
true, have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen.
He has not at present--few men have. But what Cimon would not be refined
by so fair an Iphigenia? Such frivolities as he now shows belong but
to youth and inexperience of life. Happy the brother who could see his
sister the wife of Frank Hazeldean."

The marchesa leaned her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage
was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate
widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her
unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul;
so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex
character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed
position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various
debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her--not
without design on the part of the count, who though grasping, was not
miserly, and who by precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one
time, and refusals of all aid at another, had involved her in debt in
order to retain his hold on her; so utterly painful and humiliating to
a woman of her pride and her birth was the station that she held in the
world,--that in marriage she saw liberty, life, honour, self-redemption;
and these thoughts, while they compelled her to co-operate with the
schemes by which the count, on securing to himself a bride, was to
bestow on herself a dower, also disposed her now to receive with favour
Randal Leslie's pleadings on behalf of his friend.

The advocate saw that he had made an impression, and with the marvellous
skill which his knowledge of those natures that engaged his study
bestowed on his intelligence, he continued to improve his cause by such
representations as were likely to be most effective. With what admirable
tact he avoided panegyric of Frank as the mere individual, and drew him
rather as the type, the ideal of what a woman in Beatrice's position
might desire, in the safety, peace, and Honour of a home, in the trust
and constancy and honest confiding love of its partner! He did not paint
an elysium,--he described a haven; he did not glowingly delineate a hero
of romance,--he soberly portrayed that Representative of the Respectable
and the Real which a woman turns to when romance begins to seem to her
but delusion. Verily, if you could have looked int