Not that even now, in his fiftieth year, he might not well have entered the lists with many a younger man as a candidate for the favour of the sex. He was a man of a remarkably fine presence, tall, well made, and with a natural dignity and graceful bearing in all his movements, which were very impressive. He had never given in to the modern fashion of wearing either beard or moustache. And the contours of his face were too good and even noble to have gained anything by being so hidden. The large, strong, rather square jaw and chin, and smooth placid cheeks were strongly expressive of quiet decision and dignified force of will. The mouth, almost always the tell-tale feature of the face, seemed in his case rather calculated to puzzle any one who would have speculated on the meanings shadowed forth by the lines of it. It was certainly, with its large rows of unexceptionably brilliant teeth, a very handsome mouth. And it was often not devoid of much sweetness. Nobody had ever imagined that they detected any evil expression among its meanings. But whereas a physiognomist looking at that generally faithful expositor of the moral man, when it was at rest, would have been inclined to say, that it was a mouth indicative of much capacity for deep and strong passion, a further study of it in its varied movements would have led him to the conclusion that no strong or violent passions had ever been there to leave their traces among its lines. The whole face was so essentially calm, unruffled, and placidly dignified. The loftly noble forehead, the strongly marked brow, the well-opened calm grey eye, all told the same tale of a mind within well-balanced, thoroughly at peace with itself, and thoroughly contented with its outward manifestations, and with every particular of its position. Clearly the Marchese di Castelmare was a remarkably handsome man. And yet there was something about him,--and always had been even as a young man, which seemed to be in natural accordance with the fact that he had never seemed to seek female society, save as an amphytrion receiving all Ravenna within his hospitable doors. There was a kind of austerity about his bearing;--a something difficult to define, which would have prevented any girl from fancying that he was at all likely to want to make love to her; a something which made it as impossible that the refined courtesy of his address should have called a pleased blush to any girl's cheek, or made her pulse move one beat the faster, as that she should have been so affected by the imposition of the hands of the bishop who confirmed her!