You see this brooch, with the large drop sapphire and diamond, is from the Duke." She inclined her head without enthusiasm, and took her own small pearls from her ears, and replaced them by the big sapphire and diamond earrings; a riviere of alternate solitaire sapphires and diamonds she clasped round her snowy throat.
"You look absolutely beautiful," her uncle exclaimed with admiration.

"I knew I could perfectly trust to your taste--the dress is perfection." "Then I suppose we shall have to go down," she said quietly.
She was perfectly calm, her face expressionless; if there was a tempestuous suggestion in her somber eyes she generally kept the lids lowered.

Inwardly, she felt a raging rebellion.

This was the first ceremony of the sacrifice, and although in the abstract her fine senses appreciated the jewels and all her new and beautiful clothes and _apanages_, they in no way counterbalanced the hateful degradation.
To her it was a hideous mockery--the whole thing; she was just a chattel, a part of a business bargain.

She could not guess her uncle's motive for the transaction (he had a deep one, of course), but Lord Tancred's was plain and purely contemptible.