he thrilling of the
heart of Casimir Delavigne:
"Beloved Isaure,
Her hand makes sign--
No more, no more,
To rest in mine.
O vierge Marie,
Pour moi priez Dieu!
Adieu, dear land,
Isaure, adieu!"
As he murmured with limpid eye the last words, he saw in the forecastle
not far from him a girl looking at him. There was unmistakable sadness
in her glance of interest. In truth she was thinking of just such a man
as Jean Jacques, whom she could never see any more, for he had paid with
his life the penalty of the conspiracy in which her father, standing now
behind her on the leaky Antoine, had been a tool, and an evil tool. Here
in Jean Jacques was the same ruddy brown face, black restless eye,
and young, silken, brown beard. Also there was an air of certainty and
universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent,
there was no self-consciousness. The girl's dead and gone conspirator
had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the
broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same
goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques--he was but
Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature
that could see little difference between things which were alike
superficially, and in the young provincial she only saw one who looked
like the man she had loved. True, his moustaches did not curl upwards at
the ends as did those of Carvillho Gonzales, and he did not look out of
the corner of his eyes and smoke black cigarettes; but there he was, her
Carvillho with a difference--only such a difference that made him to her
Carvillho II., and not the ghost of Carvillho I.
She was a maiden who might have been as good as need be for all life,
so far as appearances went. She had a wonderful skin, a smooth, velvety
cheek, where faint red roses came and went, as it might seem at will;
with a deep brown eye; and eh, but she was grandly tall--so Jean Jacques
thought, while he drew himself up to his full five feet, six and a half
with a determined air. Even at his best, however, Jean Jacques could not
reach within three inches of her height.
Yet he did not regard her as at all overdone because of that. He thought
her hair very fine, as it waved away from her low forehead in a grace
which reminded him of the pictures of the Empress Eugenie, and of the
sister
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