When he left home, the viscount de Douarnenez was a slight, slender, graceful stripling, with a fair, delicate complexion, a profusion of light hair waving in soft curls over his shoulders, a light, elastic step, and a frame which, though it showed the promise already of strength to be attained with maturity, was conspicuous as yet for ease, and agility, and pliability, rather than for power or robustness. On his return, he had lost, it is true, no jot of his gracefulness or ease of demeanor, but he had shot up and expanded into a tall, broad-shouldered, round-chested, thin-flanked man, with a complexion burned to the darkest hue of which a European skin is susceptible, and which perhaps required the aid of the full, soft blue eye to prove it to be European--with a glance as quick, as penetrating, and at the same time as calm and steady, as that of the eagle when he gazes undazzled at the noontide splendor. His hair had been cut short to wear beneath the casque, which was still carried by cavaliers, and had grown so much darker, that this alteration alone would have gone far to defy the recognition of his friends. He wore a thick, dark mustache on his upper lip, and a large “royal,” which we should now-a-days call an “imperial,” on his chin. The whole aspect and expression of face, moreover, was altered, even in a greater degree than his complexion or his person. All the quick, sparkling play and mobility of feature, the sharp flash of rapidly-succeeding sentiments and strong emotions, expressed on the ingenuous face as soon as they were conceived within the brain--all these had disappeared completely--disappeared, never to return. The grave composure of the thoughtful, self-possessed, experienced soldier, sufficient in himself to meet every emergency, every alternation of fortune, had succeeded the imaginative, impulsive ardor of the impetuous, gallant boy. There was a shadow, too, a heavy shadow of something more than thought; for it was, in truth, deep, real, heartfelt melancholy, which lent an added gloom to the cold fixity of eye and lip--which had obliterated all the gay and gleeful flashes which used, from moment to moment, to light up the countenance so speaking and so frank in its disclosures. Yet it would have been difficult to say whether Raoul de St. Renan--grave, dark, and sorrowful, as he now showed--was not both a handsomer and more attractive person than he had been in his earlier days, as the gay and thoughtless viscount de Douarnenez.