"Did I blush?" said the Marchesa, with a silvery laugh. "Nay, I think that your zeal for your friend misled you. But I will own frankly, I have been touched by his honest, ingenuous love--so evident, yet rather looked than spoken. I have contrasted the love that honors me, with the suitors that seek to degrade; more I can not say. For though I grant that your friend is handsome, high-spirited, and generous, still he is not what--" "You mistake, believe me," interrupted Randal. "You shall not finish your sentence. He _is_ all that you do not yet suppose him; for his shyness, and his very love, his very respect for your superiority, do not allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is true, have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen. He has not at present--few men have. But what Cimon would not be refined by so fair an Iphigenia? Such frivolities as he now shows belong but to youth and inexperience of life. Happy the brother who could see his sister the wife of Frank Hazeldean." The Marchesa bent her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul--so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her--not without design on the part of the Count, who though grasping, was not miserly, and who by precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one time, and refusals of all aid at another, had involved her in debt in order to retain his hold on her--so utterly painful and humiliating to a woman of her pride and her birth was the station that she held in the world--that in marriage she saw liberty, life, honor, self-redemption; and these thoughts while they compelled her to co-operate with the schemes by which the Count, on securing to himself a bride, was to bestow on herself a dower, also disposed her now to receive with favor Randal Leslie's pleadings on behalf of his friend.