draper dropped a word of imprecation against the girls. Evidently
alarmed, the wife opened a secret door, and led in, half fainting, the
Italian's madonna, to whom he was careful to pay no attention; only,
to avoid a too-studied indifference, he glanced at the girl before he
turned to his host and said in his own language:--

"Is that your daughter, signore?"

Perez de Lagounia (such was the merchant's name) had large commercial
relations with Genoa, Florence, and Livorno; he knew Italian, and
replied in the same language:--

"No; if she were my daughter I should take less precautions. The child
is confided to our care, and I would rather die than see any evil happen
to her. But how is it possible to put sense into a girl of eighteen?"

"She is very handsome," said Montefiore, coldly, not looking at her face
again.

"Her mother's beauty is celebrated," replied the merchant, briefly.

They continued to smoke, watching each other. Though Montefiore
compelled himself not to give the slightest look which might contradict
his apparent coldness, he could not refrain, at a moment when Perez
turned his head to expectorate, from casting a rapid glance at the young
girl, whose sparkling eyes met his. Then, with that science of vision
which gives to a libertine, as it does to a sculptor, the fatal power of
disrobing, if we may so express it, a woman, and divining her shape by
inductions both rapid and sagacious, he beheld one of those masterpieces
of Nature whose creation appears to demand as its right all the
happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun of Spain
had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of seraphic
calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused beneath
that diaphanous complexion,--due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which
vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her head, fell
thence with black reflections round the delicate transparent ears and
defined the outlines of a blue-veined throat. These luxuriant locks
brought into strong relief the dazzling eyes and the scarlet lips of
a well-arched mouth. The bodice of the country set off the lines of
a figure that swayed as easily as a branch of willow. She was not the
Virgin of Italy, but the Virgin of Spain, of Murillo, the only artist
daring enough to have painted the Mother of God intoxicated with the joy
of conceiving the Christ,--the glowing imagination of the boldest and
also the warmest of