Explore "The Pot of Basil" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a very impressive ceremony, this betrothal by ring -- conventual, almost sacramental in its character. The ambassador's face had been flushed, his voice hushed, as he had presented this visible symbol of what was to him but something less than a hypostatic union, in which he himself modestly represented the third figure in the trinity. Whereafter, not as bride of Christ, but of Christ's more confident vicegerent, the heir of Austria, stood Isabella, pledged by token of the shining gem half slipping from her listless finger.
The words were spoken, the gage hung there in witness of their numbing actuality; she was left alone with the duke her father. Its first heat of transport had faded from Don Philip's cheek, and been succeeded by a rather rigid pallor, a look of hardness, both furtive and resentful. He uttered a little sardonic laugh -- the most extreme expression of humour to be allowed himself by an Infant of Spain -- and, pacing an aimless step or two, turned with a sudden violence on his child.