I had early learned to watch people's countenances as the weather-glasses of their minds, and thence to judge, not only of what was passing within at the moment, but also of their habitual feelings and inherent disposition. This had been taught me by my father, who had established his criterions for judging by long experience; and I had not seen the fierce, sharp look, and the deep, heavy scowl, upon the face of the Duke more than twice, when I established it in my own mind, as a fact beyond doubt, that he was both suspicious and revengeful. At the same time I discovered, by other circumstances, that he was highly sensitive to ridicule; and that, knowing well to how many jests he would expose himself if he suffered his irritable jealousy to appear, he laboured strenuously to cover it by the same light and witty manner of treating everything, which in that day was universally affected by all Frenchmen. In this he was not particularly successful; for, though his mind was quick and brilliant enough, his heart was too full of deep and powerful feelings to harmonise well with that playful badinage which alone affects the surface.
So much for my new master; but there are other members of his family who yet remain to be noticed. The first of these, of course, is Madame la Duchesse, to whom he led me immediately after I had been presented to himself, and introduced me as his new page, of whom she had heard so much. She was a very lovely woman, and at heart a most amiable one; considerably younger than her husband, perhaps about four-and-twenty years of age; and though, I believe, it would be doing Diana herself no injustice to compare her to Madame de Villardin in point of chastity, yet at the time I was first presented to her, ere sorrow or domestic discomfort had tamed the light heart and banished the vanities of youth, she had decidedly that love of admiration which has often, in this world, done more harm to a woman's character than half-a-dozen _faux pas_. It mattered not with whom she was in company--rank, station, age, made no difference--admired she was determined to be by every one who came within the sphere of her influence: a thousand little airs would she assume to excite attention; and bright and sparkling was the triumph which lighted up her eyes when she had succeeded in captivating or attracting. In the case of myself even, a boy of twelve years old, she could not resist the desire of displaying the same graces which she spread out before others; and when her husband brought me forward to her, the smile that played around her lips, the flash that glistened from her fine eyes, and the elegant attitude with which she held me by the arm, and gazed for a moment in my face, were all a little more than natural, and very, very different from the calm, sweet manners of the beautiful Emily Langleigh.