Penny Blood Serial Cover — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

42 ALFRED DE ROSANN: as he was to the earth with a deep sense of shame and degradation, still did the only half-suppressed energies of a noble mind flash from his dark eyes, and stamp him at once as a being totally different from the rest of the motley group in which he now found himself. His graceful form was not rebbed of its perfections by the unseemly garb that enveloped it; nor could the beauty of his regular features be disfigur- ed by the traces of anguish and despair. His years had perhaps scarcely reached their twenty-fourth sum- mer; in stature he was somewhat above the standard height of a Frenchman; his figure was rather slender than athletic; his hair was black; his eyes were large and dark; and his hands and feet small even to a fault. Let us leave him a moment to his bitter re- flections, and direct the reader’s attention to those in- dividuals who appear so deeply interested in his fate. The first was an elderly man, with white hair, and a pale brow on which sate untimely wrinkles. And yet that hoariness of locks and those numerous traces on his forehead were more the effects of deep thought, and settled melancholy, than the work of years; for his age scarcely exceeded five-and-forty. He was tall, well-formed, and possessed features far from dis- agreeable. In his youth he must have been one of those who, endowed with many gifts from the hands of capricious Nature, are calculated to win the favour of the fair sex, and make their way in the world, if they have no fortune of their own, through the me- dium of an auspicious marriage. He was dressed in deep black, and on his left arm hung a large cloak, with which, despite of the bitter chill of the morning, he thought not of covering himself. His ideas were too deeply occupied by another and more material affair than the cloudy sky and the impending storm: had a second deluge commenced, he would not have perceived the force of the falling waters. There are times when the soul of man is thus abstracted from the scenes of frequent occurrence; and when its re- flections are alone engaged in the contemplation of GoOmicbdooks com