.

DOOMED.
Across the length of that hall our eyes met--hers and mine--and held each other's glances.

To me the room and all within it formed an indistinct and misty picture, from out of which there clearly gleamed my Paola's sweet, white face.
All at the table had risen with Ramiro, and now, copying their leader, they bared their heads in outward token of such respect as certainly would have been felt by any men less abandoned than were they before so much saintly beauty and distress.
Lucagnolo had stepped aside, and Ramiro was now bowing low and ceremoniously before Madonna.

His face I could not see, since his back was towards me, but his tones, as they floated across the hall to where I stood, came laden with subservience.
"Madonna, I give praise and thanks to Heaven for this," said he.

"I was afflicted by the gravest misgivings for your safety, and I am more than thankful to behold you safe and sound." There was a hypocritical flavour of courtliness about his words, and a mincing of his tones that suggested the efforts of a bull-calf to imitate the warbling of a throstle.
Madonna paid him no heed; indeed, she appeared not to have heard him, for her eyes continued to look past him and at me.