There was no refinement there, no
mark of good breeding; all of the mirage-like glamour that may have
bewildered and deceived _her_, long years ago, was gone. What she
had evidently mistaken for the nobility of true manhood, in her
innocence and folly, was no more than the arrogance of splendid
health. This man had been beautiful in his day, and frankly pleasing.
That was long before the thing that was in his blood, and in the blood
of his fathers, perhaps, had claimed dominion: the mysterious thing
which inevitably registers the curse of the base-born, so that no man
may be deceived. Blood always tells, but usually it tells too late.
But of the Braddocks and their hateful history, more anon. Let us look
at this man as he now is, just as we have looked, perhaps too
casually, at the woman who called him husband.
A heavy black mustache, lightly touched with gray, shaded a coarse,
rather sinister mouth, from the corner of which protruded an unlighted
but thoroughly-chewed cigar. His hair and eyebrows were thick and
black. Thin red lines formed a network in his cheeks, telling of the
habits that had put them there; on his forehead there was a perpetual
scowl, a line slashed between the eyes as if laid there by a knife.
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