The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the
steps of evening on an autumn day--grey, as if it clothed processes of
decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon
a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the
creaking threshold of premature age.
The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was
still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in
his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were
the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his
lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet
he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked
furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself.
It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting
gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed
immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon
it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and
shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still
noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.
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