In one respect only could the world fail to be wholly and perfectly contented with the Marchese Lamberto di Castelmare.  At the age of fifty he was still a bachelor!  Not that the continuance of the noble line of Castelmare was thereby compromised.  The sister-in-law already mentioned had a son, a young man of two-and-twenty, at the time in question, who was the heir to the wealth and honours of the house, and who, it was to be hoped, would also inherit all that accumulated treasure of public esteem and respect which his uncle had been so uninterruptedly laying up.  Neither could a social objection to the Marchese’s bachelorhood be raised on the score of any such laxity of moral conduct as the world is wont to expect, and to tolerate with more or less of indulgence, in persons so free from special ties.  Had the Marchese been an archbishop himself, instead of being merely the intimate friend of one, it could not have seemed in Ravenna more out of the question to mention his respected name in connection with any scandal or inuendo of the kind.  There was not a mother in Ravenna who would not have been proud to see her daughter honoured by any such intercourse with the Marchese as might be natural between a father and his child.  Proud indeed the most noble of those matrons would have been could she have supposed that any such intercourse tended towards sentiments of a more tender nature.  But all hopes of this kind had been long given up in Ravenna.  It was quite understood that the Marchese was not a marrying man.

Not that even now, in his fiftieth year, he might not well have entered the lists with many a younger man as a candidate for the favour of the sex.  He was a man of a remarkably fine presence, tall, well made, and with a natural dignity and graceful bearing in all his movements, which were very impressive.  He had never given in to the modern fashion of wearing either beard or moustache.  And the contours of his face were too good and even noble to have gained anything by being so hidden.  The large, strong, rather square jaw and chin, and smooth placid cheeks were strongly expressive of quiet decision and dignified force of will.  The mouth, almost always the tell-tale feature of the face, seemed in his case rather calculated to puzzle any one who would have speculated on the meanings shadowed forth by the lines of it.  It was certainly, with its large rows of unexceptionably brilliant teeth, a very handsome mouth.  And it was often not devoid of much sweetness.  Nobody had ever imagined that they detected any evil expression among its meanings.  But whereas a physiognomist looking at that generally faithful expositor of the moral man, when it was at rest, would have been inclined to say, that it was a mouth indicative of much capacity for deep and strong passion, a further study of it in its varied movements would have led him to the conclusion that no strong or violent passions had ever been there to leave their traces among its lines.  The whole face was so essentially calm, unruffled, and placidly dignified.