Pausing where she stood the lady examined the aspect of the individual
who thus made himself so completely at home on a building which she
deemed her unquestioned property. He was a youth who might properly have
been characterized by a word the judicious chronicler would not readily
use in such a connexion, preferring to reserve it for raising images of
the opposite sex. Whether because no deep felicity is likely to arise
from the condition, or from any other reason, to say in these days that a
youth is beautiful is not to award him that amount of credit which the
expression would have carried with it if he had lived in the times of the
Classical Dictionary. So much, indeed, is the reverse the case that the
assertion creates an awkwardness in saying anything more about him.
The beautiful youth usually verges so perilously on the incipient coxcomb,
who is about to become the Lothario or Juan among the neighbouring
maidens, that, for the due understanding of our present young man, his
sublime innocence of any thought concerning his own material aspect, or
that of others, is most fervently asserted, and must be as fervently
believed.
Such as he was, there the lad sat. The sun shone full in his face, and
on his head he wore a black velvet skull-cap, leaving to view below it a
curly margin of very light shining hair, which accorded well with the
flush upon his cheek.
He had such a complexion as that with which Raffaelle enriches the
countenance of the youthful son of Zacharias,--a complexion which, though
clear, is far enough removed from virgin delicacy, and suggests plenty of
sun and wind as its accompaniment. His features were sufficiently
straight in the contours to correct the beholder's first impression that
the head was the head of a girl. Beside him stood a little oak table,
and in front was the telescope.
His visitor had ample time to make these observations; and she may have
done so all the more keenly through being herself of a totally opposite
type. Her hair was black as midnight, her eyes had no less deep a shade,
and her complexion showed the richness demanded as a support to these
decided features. As she continued to look at the pretty fellow before
her, apparently so far abstracted into some speculative world as scarcely
to know a real one, a warmer wave of her warm temperament glowed visibly
through her, and a qualified observer might from this have hazarded a
guess that there was Romance blood in her veins.
But even the interest attaching to the youth could not arrest her
attention for ever, and as he made no further signs of moving his eye
from the instrument she broke the silence with-'What do you see?--something happening somewhere?' 'Yes, quite a catastrophe!' he automatically murmured, without moving
round.