In the year of grace 1854, Ernest Philip King, a young attaché of the English embassy at Athens, married Haidée Amic, the most beautiful woman in that city. Neither of the pair possessed a fortune, and their united means afforded a not abundantly luxurious style of living; but they loved each other, and the fact that he was the portionless son of a Church of England divine, and she the daughter of an impecunious Greek of noble family and royal lineage, was no drawback to the early happiness of their wooing and wedding. They had two children, a boy and a girl, born within two years of each other in Athens: the girl, the elder of the two, they named Hyacinthe; the boy was called Tancredi.
Five years after this marriage had taken place King lost his position at the embassy, and only received in exchange for it a mean government clerkship in Rome at a meagre salary. Thither he removed, and after dragging out a miserable and disappointed existence five years longer, he died in the arms of his beautiful and still young wife. Thereafter the youthful widow managed to keep life in herself and her two little ones by dint of pinching, management and contrivance on the pittance that had come to her from the estate of her impecunious father. They lived in a palace, it is true--but who does not live in a palace in Rome?--high up, where the cooing doves built their nests under the leaden eaves, and where the cold winds whistled shrilly in their season.
Such accomplishments as the mother was mistress of she imparted to her children. What other education they received was derived from intercourse with many foreigners, English, French, Russians, and from familiarity with the sights and wonders of Rome, its galleries, ruins, palaces, studios.
At eighteen Tancredi had obtained a situation as amanuensis to an English historian resident in Italy; and Hyacinthe already brooded over some active and unusual future that spread itself as yet but dimly before her. She inherited from her mother her unparalleled beauty--the clear, colorless, flawless skin, the straight features, the lustrous eyes with their luxuriant lashes and long level brows, her lithe and gracious figure and slender feet and hands: of the English father her only physical trace was the large, full, mobile mouth with its firm white teeth. She had from him the modern spirit of unrest and the modern impetus and energy: from the Greek mother, a counteracting languor of temperament and an antique cast of mind.