same refinement of brow and
nostril in both, counterbalanced by a full though firm mouth and
powerful chin, which gave an expression of proud tenacity and latent
impetuousness: an expression carried out in the backward poise of the
girl's head, and the grand line of her neck and shoulders. It was a
type of face of which one could not venture to say whether it would
inspire love or only that unwilling admiration which is mixed with
dread: the question must be decided by the eyes, which often seem
charged with a more direct message from the soul. But the eyes of the
father had long been silent, and the eyes of the daughter were bent on
the Latin pages of Politian's `Miscellanea,' from which she was reading
aloud at the eightieth chapter, to the following effect:--

"There was a certain nymph of Thebes named Chariclo, especially dear to
Pallas; and this nymph was the mother of Teiresias. But once when in
the heat of summer, Pallas, in company with Chariclo, was bathing her
disrobed limbs in the Heliconian Hippocrene, it happened that Teiresias
coming as a hunter to quench his thirst at the same fountain,
inadvertently beheld Minerva unveiled, and immediately became blind.
For it is declared in the Saturnian laws, that he who beholds the gods
against their will, shall atone for it by a heavy penalty... When
Teiresias had fallen into this calamity, Pallas, moved by the tears of
Chariclo, endowed him with prophecy and length of days, and even caused
his prudence and wisdom to continue after he had entered among the
shades, so that an oracle spake from his tomb: and she gave him a staff,
wherewith, as by a guide, he might walk without stumbling... And hence,
Nonnus, in the fifth book of the `Dionysiaca,' introduces Actreon
exclaiming that he calls Teiresias happy, since, without dying, and with
the loss of his eyesight merely, he had beheld Minerva unveiled, and
thus, though blind, could for evermore carry her image in his soul."

At this point in the reading, the daughter's hand slipped from the back
of the chair and met her father's, which he had that moment uplifted;
but she had not looked round, and was going on, though with a voice a
little altered by some suppressed feeling, to read the Greek quotation
from Nonnus, when the old man said--

"Stay, Romola; reach me my own copy of Nonnus. It is a more correct
copy than any in Poliziano's hands, for I made emendations in it which
have not yet been communicated to an