About an hour before midnight, during a pause between two dances, Magdalen was walking down one of the rooms in company with Lieutenant Gordon, who was repeating to her some of the anecdotes which Marcelino Ponce de Leon had told about his negroes at the banquet not two hours before, when she was accosted by an officer in gala uniform, with the epaulets of a major on his shoulders. She started at his voice as he spoke to her, and then looked up at him with a glad smile, but as her eyes met his they fell beneath their earnest gaze and a warm flush spread over her cheeks. The officer who had addressed her, and whose bright dark eyes were riveted upon her face as he bowed lowly before her, was Marcelino himself. Marcelino had never forgotten those eyes which had haunted him during the long summer and autumn which he had passed training his negroes, and he had eagerly accepted Don Alfonso's subsequent invitation to visit him at his quinta, but during the many evenings he had passed there since he had never again seen the same look in those eyes, often as he had looked into them in search of it, and he had learned to think of Magdalen as an amiable but very plain-featured girl, with a certain nameless fascination about her for which he could not account. Also, as a girl with a talent for conversation, and a voice to which he could listen for hours with the same feeling as though he had been listening to music. Magdalen had inherited from her English mother a gift more charming than any physical beauty, and one less liable to fade, that of a most melodious voice. In Buenos Aires, where physical beauty is so general among women, a melodious voice is but rarely heard, and Marcelino had often caused great amusement to his friend Gordon during many months past by his mode of asking him to accompany him on a visit to Don Alfonso. "Come out with me to the Miserere, and talk to your paisanita for me while I listen." As Marcelino now looked upon Magdalen, with the girlish joy beaming in her face, he saw once again that same look in her eyes which had haunted him for so long and which he had never forgotten. Her face seemed to him lighted up with a new beauty all its own, a beauty far exceeding all beauty of feature or complexion, the beauty of expression. When she smiled upon him with the glad smile with which she received him, her soul looked out upon him through those large grey eyes, a soul in consonance with the sweet voice he loved to listen to, the soul of a large-hearted, loving woman. To Marcelino she never appeared plain-featured again. He asked her hand for the next dance, and then instead of dancing they sauntered away to a quiet corner, where they sat down and talked together. "So Gordon has been telling you about the banquet?" said Marcelino. "Not much about the banquet, but about the speech you made," replied Magdalen.