Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 249: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

232 REYNOLDS’ WORKS all the more remarkable and all the greater, because it was not the lapse of years alone that would have effected it, — -—— care and sorrow would have combined to accomplish the work. ‘There was something profoundly sad — something indeed solemnly awful — in the thought that perhaps in a few minutes he would at a single glance be enabled to observe the full extent of that change, and to perceive how powerful had been the ravages of time and the desolating influences of affliction. And then —as he stood thus meditating — back to the mind of the Marquis of Eagledean came the image of Alexandrina as she was when he had last seen her. Then she was in all the glorious beauty of womanhood, — perfectly resembling that portrait which he had so recently seen in his daughter Elizabeth’s possession, and which was engraved from an original painted in 1828, when she was in her thirtieth year. Then her countenance was of a per- fectly oval shape, with a forehead of noble height, —a forehead, too, fair and pure as the chastest marble of Paros, and the splendid face was wont to be framed with a perfect cloud of raven tresses showering upon her superb shoulders and upon her back. Then the darkly pencilled brows threw out in lovelier contrast the purity of those temples on the opals of which they were set, and the long, ebon fringes of the eyes mitigated without subduing the lustre of the magnificent orbs themselves. Then, too, the lips from which his own chad so often culled ecstatic but guilty kisses were full and of the richest redness, and the low-bodied dress, which she was wont to wear in compliance with the fashion of the age, afforded a glimpse of the well-proportioned bust. Such was the bright and beautiful image which was conjured up to the memory of the Marquis of Hagledean, —the image of her who had possessed his first and only love, — the love of an entire life. And as he reflected upon this image, and thought how time and affliction might have marred those lovely lineaments, rendering their possessor prematurely old, the tears trickled down the nobleman’s cheeks, and he wept, oh, he wept, as convulsively as a child. And was not he too changed? Would even the penetra- ting eyes of love — if love she still cherished toward him — be enabled to discern in his altered person one single linea- ment to remind her of the handsome and courtly individual who had been the object of her worship in bygone years? Gomichoo cS