He loved her--loved her as well as most women need to be, or know that they can be loved. But he was too happy, too prosperous, too universally beloved, to love well. He was a man, with all his beauty, more likely to be fascinating to his own sex than to hers, for the women who love best, do not love in the character they live in; and his out-of-doors heart, whose joyfulness was so contagious, and whose bold impulses were so manly and open, contented itself with gay homage, and left unplummeted the sweetest as well as deepest wells of the thoughtful tenderness of woman. To most observers, Stephania Wangrave would have seemed only born to be gay--the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature, that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of such works of nature as encroach on the models of Heaven) not to know this to be a light veil over a picture of melancholy meaning. Sadness was the tone of her mind's inner coloring. Tears were the subterranean river upon which her soul's bark floated with the most loved freight of her thought's accumulation--the sunny waters of joy, where alone she was thought to voyage, being the tide on which her heart embarked no venture, and which seemed to her triflingly garish and even profaning to the hallowed delicacy of the inner nature. It was so strange to me that Palgray did not see this through every lineament of her marvelous beauty. There was a glow under her skin, but no color--an effect of paleness--fair as the lotus-leaf, but warmer and brighter, and which came through the alabaster fineness of the grain, like something the eye cannot define, but which we know by some spirit-perception to be the effluence of purer existence, the breathing through, as it were, of the luminous tenanting of an angel. To this glowing paleness, with golden hair, I never had seen united any but a disposition of predominant melancholy; and it seemed to me dull indeed otherwise to read it. But there were other betrayals of the same inner nature of Stephania. Her lips, cut with the fine tracery of the penciling upon a tulip-cup, were of a slender and delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took--(of the senses)--only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of beauty which we dream to have been Mary's, in the childhood of Jesus. A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania's every look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes, were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of tenderness as tearful as it was unfathomable and angelic.