Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/228

Rh she, arrogant and fastidious as to birth, as though she had been born before the '89, was touched by it to the core.

She had heard, too, of how he lived; without debt, yet with dignity, with the utmost simplicity and without reproach; there was something in his fortunes which seemed to her worthier than all distinction and success, something that stirred that more poetic side of her nature, which the world had never allowed to awake, but which had been born with her nevertheless. She was serious and dreaming as she lingered in the beautiful old chapel, under whose mosaic pavement there lay the dust of so many generations of his race. He noticed her silence and thought to himself:

"Perhaps she is thinking how base it is in a man as poor as I to seek a woman so rich as herself;"—but she was not thinking that at all as she swept on in her sables, with her delicate cheeks, fair as the lovely Niphétos rose, against the darkness of the fur.

That immortality which she had been doubting in the morning, did not seem so absurdly