The moonlight bathed her, as in her white robe she leaned upon the parapet gazing upward into the empyrean.

A sweet, delicate face I saw, not endowed, perhaps, with that exquisite balance and proportion of feature wherein they tell us beauty lies, but blessed with a wondrously dainty beauty all its own; a beauty, perhaps, as much of expression as of form; for in that gentle countenance was mirrored every tender grace of girlhood, all that is fresh and pure and virginal.
I held my breath, I think, as I stood in ravished contemplation of that white vision.

If this were Lavedan, and that the cold Roxalanne who had sent my bold Chatellerault back to Paris empty-handed then were my task a very welcome one.
How little it had weighed with me that I was come to Languedoc to woo a woman bearing the name of Roxalanne de Lavedan I have already shown.

But here in this same Languedoc I beheld to-night a woman whom it seemed I might have loved, for not in ten years--not, indeed, in all my life--had any face so wrought upon me and called to my nature with so strong a voice.
I gazed at that child, and I thought of the women that I had known--the bold, bedizened beauties of a Court said to be the first in Europe.

And then it came to me that this was no demoiselle of Lavedan, no demoiselle at all in fact, for the noblesse of France owned no such faces.