The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.

She sat at her lamb’s-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the contrast.  This man’s face was the born orator’s, with the light-giving eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness and enterprise, of Cicero’s rival in the forum before he took the headship of armies and marched to empire.

The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness.  Alas, he could not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build!  One could vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election.  So vigorously rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing outpour.  Looking on him was listening.  Yes, the looking on him sufficed.  Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men, that drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood.  She shrank to smaller and smaller as she looked.

Be sure that she knew who he was.  No, says she.  But she knew.  It terrified her soul to think he was Alvan.  She feared scarcely less that it might not be he.  Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased herself, and gloated.  It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly! impossible!—­And then it ran:  If he, oh me!  If another, woe me!  For she had come to see Alvan.  Alvan and she shared ideas.  They talked marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin:  and supposing he was not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment.  The supposition that he was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.

Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew?  She feasted.  It was a noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes.  Perchance a Jew of the Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish.  There is the noble Jew as well as the bestial Gentile.  There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect.  He may well think his race favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still.  The noble Jew is grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery eastern blood, and in his manhood he is—­ay, what you see there! a figure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and be tempered by the intellect.

She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of very eminent surprise.  Necessarily it would be the greatest of surprises.