So, long after my own sense of what was good and true had condemned my weakness in shedding one tear for Cave Charteris, the beauty and animation and charm of manner which had first enthralled me continued to exercise their baneful influence over my mind. I had seen that beauty again to-day and heard that voice, and what did I think of them, looking and hearing with eyes and ears that had been healed of love’s sickness? Well! he was very handsome, very handsome indeed; there was no doubt of that! I remembered having heard it said, in olden days, that he had been painted by one of the Royal Academicians as ‘Jason,’ and having been very anxious to see the picture for which he stood. I could well imagine that he had made an excellent model for ‘Jason.’ He was tall, but not too tall: men over six feet in height are seldom well proportioned. His characteristics were strictly Saxon. He had yellowish hair, cropped close to his head in soldier fashion: china blue eyes—not large, but very keen and piercing: a ruddy complexion, and finely-shaped nose and mouth. The worst fault in his appearance was the light colour of his eyebrows and lashes: and the worst fault in his expression was a look of animalism, which I seemed never to have noticed until I sat down in my own chamber and taxed my mental vision to view my old lover by the light of the new eyes with which I had regarded him that evening. It was not only because I remembered his behaviour to myself that the expression of his face had seemed cruel to me, as he chattered so affably across the dinner-table. Five years’ self-indulgence had doubtless strengthened the outward signs of his inward character; but whether he had borne those signs in embryo when we were first acquainted, I could not then recall. If he had done so, I was probably too innocent to have interpreted them aright. But there was no mistake about them now. I was considered to be an excellent judge of character, and I had examined Cave Charteris that evening as if he had been a perfect stranger to me; and read but too plainly, in the formation of his head and features, that though he might be as beautiful as the Adonis, his intellect was held in subjugation to his passions, and hatred or revenge would have the power to turn him from a polished man of the world into a brute.