possibly he
might ravish one more kiss,--would hardly be manly. He must postpone
all that for the morrow. On the morrow of course he would be there.

But his work was all before him! That prayer had to be made to his
father; or rather some wonderful effort of eloquence must be made by
which his father might be convinced that this girl was so infinitely
superior to anything of feminine creation that had ever hitherto been
seen or heard of, that all ideas as to birth, country, rank, or name
ought in this instance to count for nothing. He did believe himself
that he had found such a pearl, that no question of setting need be
taken into consideration. If the Duke would not see it the fault
would be in the Duke's eyes, or perhaps in his own words,--but
certainly not in the pearl.

Then he compared her to poor Lady Mabel, and in doing so did arrive
at something near the truth in his inward delineation of the two
characters. Lady Mabel with all her grace, with all her beauty, with
all her talent, was a creature of efforts, or, as it might be called,
a manufactured article. She strove to be graceful, to be lovely, to
be agreeable and clever. Isabel was all this and infinitely more
without any struggle. When he was most fond of Mabel, most anxious
to make her his wife, there had always been present to him a feeling
that she was old. Though he knew her age to a day,--and knew her to
be younger than himself, yet she was old. Something had gone of her
native bloom, something had been scratched and chipped from the first
fair surface, and this had been repaired by varnish and veneering.
Though he had loved her he had never been altogether satisfied with
her. But Isabel was as young as Hebe. He knew nothing of her actual
years, but he did know that to have seemed younger, or to have seemed
older,--to have seemed in any way different from what she was,--would
have been to be less perfect.

CHAPTER LXIX

"Pert Poppet!"

On a Sunday morning,--while Lord Silverbridge was alone in a certain
apartment in the house in Carlton Terrace which was called his own
sitting-room, the name was brought him of a gentleman who was anxious
to see him. He had seen his father and had used all the eloquence
of which he was master,--but not quite with the effect which
he had desired. His father had been very kind, but he, too,
had been eloquent;--and had, as is often the case with orators,
been apparently more moved by his own words than by