“By all the torturing fates that ever turned awry love’s currents!” exclaimed Buondlemonte, as he reached the street, “but my destined spouse seems to be formed more in the mould of the tigress than the dove. A further promise,” he muttered ironically, “of our mutual happiness!” CHAPTER V. “Ye are beautiful, ye heavens!” murmured Camilla Donati, as she gazed from a casement of an apartment in her mother’s palace upon the gorgeous starlight of an April evening; “but what hope do you bring to me? _He_ who was wont to make even darkness seem light, even he, is another’s, and ye shine in mockery of my anguish—your brightness makes my gloom the darker!” It was, indeed, a beautiful evening; but he must have been an anchorite who would not have turned from the balmy air and richly studded sky, to gaze upon the graceful form and heavenly countenance of the fair being who apostrophized the stars. Her age would have been that of a mere girl’s in any clime save those in which nature seems precocious; but her figure was that of a woman’s, in the zenith of her loveliness. Eighteen summers had scarcely passed over Camilla Donati, and, to contemplate her appearance, the thought would suggest itself that each succeeding year had outvied the efforts of the one that had preceded it, in a struggle to make her beauty faultless. Her complexion was exquisitely fair. The natural color in her cheeks, as she sat in pensive thought, had disappeared, but still a roseate shade remained, and that, perhaps, shone in more perfect contrast with the transparent skin on which it rested. Pygmalion, when he worshiped the effort of his own art, could not have beheld more chastely beautiful features than she possessed. An ample forehead, shaded by clustering curls, terminated where the penciled brows overlooked lids, fringed with long silken lashes, which contained within their orbits a pair of lustrous, soul-speaking eyes. A nose of Grecian outline, and a mouth—formed from the model of Cupid’s bow—with lips of clear vermilion, seemed to speak an “alarum to love.” When we add to this description a chin of unsurpassed contour, and a neck of swan-like symmetry, we may form some idea of Camilla Donati’s features. The dress she wore, though it shrouded, it did not conceal the proportions of her figure. The full, swelling bust and the slender waist could be discerned; nor were her robes so sweeping but that a fairy foot might have been discovered peeping from beneath them. A glittering veil had been thrown carelessly over her luxuriant auburn curls, but this she had put back with her delicate hand, and, as her cheek rested on that dimpled hand, she seemed too bright a thing to be profaned by the touch of sorrow; grief should have found a less transcendent temple in which to spread its sombre mantle.