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I'm sure the
Austrians find them so. Won't you sit down?"
He limped across the terrace to fetch a chair
for her, and placed himself opposite to her, leaning
against the balustrade. The light from a
window was shining full on his face; and she was
able to study it at her leisure.
She was disappointed. She had expected to
see a striking and powerful, if not pleasant face;
but the most salient points of his appearance were
a tendency to foppishness in dress and rather more
than a tendency to a certain veiled insolence of
expression and manner. For the rest, he was as
swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his
lameness, as agile as a cat. His whole personality
was oddly suggestive of a black jaguar. The forehead
and left cheek were terribly disfigured by
the long crooked scar of the old sabre-cut; and
she had already noticed that, when he began to
stammer in speaking, that side of his face was
affected with a nervous twitch. But for these
defects he would have been, in a certain restless
and uncomfortable way, rather handsome; but it
was not an attractive face.


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