'I said that but for one circumstance, that face would have been beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea--I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color, and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic penciling of the eyebrows! You have? Well, this face was really what that seemed for the moment to be. It was redder than blood-red as fire, and yet so strangely did the flame-color play through it that you knew no paint laid upon the skin could have produced the effect. It almost seemed that the skin and the whole mass of flesh were transparent, and that the red color came from some kind of fire or light within, as the red bottle in a druggist's window might glow when you were standing full in front of it, and the gas was turned on to full height behind. Every feature--brow, nose, lips, chin, even the eyes themselves, and their very pupil seemed to be pervaded and permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of flame--salamandrines--who sometimes existed out of their own element and lived and moved as mortals. 'Have I given you a strange and fearful picture? Be sure that I have not conveyed to you one thousandth part of the impression made upon myself, and that until the day I die that strange apparition will remain stamped upon the tablets of my mind. Diabolical beauty! infernal ugliness!--I would give half my life, be it longer or shorter, to be able to explain whence such things can come, to confound and stupefy all human calculation!' CHAPTER II. MORE OF PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS--THE VISIONS OF THE WHITE MIST--REBELLION, GRIEF, HOPE, BRAVERY AND DESPAIR It was after a second bottle of green-seal had flashed out its sparkles into the crystal, that Ned Martin drew a long breath like that drawn by a man discharging a painful and necessary duty, and resumed his story: