is
eyes before. The ironic, the sarcastic, the disdainful, the
passionately exultant, I had hundreds of times seen him express by what
he called a smile, but any illuminated sign of milder or warmer
feelings struck me as wholly new in his visage. It changed it as from a
mask to a face: the deep lines left his features; the very complexion
seemed clearer and fresher; that swart, sallow, southern darkness which
spoke his Spanish blood, became displaced by a lighter hue. I know not
that I have ever seen in any other human face an equal metamorphosis
from a similar cause. He now took me to the carriage: at the same
moment M. de Bassompierre came out with his niece.

In a pretty humour was Mistress Fanshawe; she had found the evening a
grand failure: completely upset as to temper, she gave way to the most
uncontrolled moroseness as soon as we were seated, and the
carriage-door closed. Her invectives against Dr. Bretton had something
venomous in them. Having found herself impotent either to charm or
sting him, hatred was her only resource; and this hatred she expressed
in terms so unmeasured and proportion so monstrous, that, after
listening for a while with assumed stoicism, my outraged sense of
justice at last and suddenly caught fire. An explosion ensued: for I
could be passionate, too; especially with my present fair but faulty
associate, who never failed to stir the worst dregs of me. It was well
that the carriage-wheels made a tremendous rattle over the flinty
Choseville pavement, for I can assure the reader there was neither dead
silence nor calm discussion within the vehicle. Half in earnest, half
in seeming, I made it my business to storm down Ginevra. She had set
out rampant from the Rue Crecy; it was necessary to tame her before we
reached the Rue Fossette: to this end it was indispensable to show up
her sterling value and high deserts; and this must be done in language
of which the fidelity and homeliness might challenge comparison with
the compliments of a John Knox to a Mary Stuart. This was the right
discipline for Ginevra; it suited her. I am quite sure she went to bed
that night all the better and more settled in mind and mood, and slept
all the more sweetly for having undergone a sound moral drubbing.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE WATCHGUARD.

M. Paul Emanuel owned an acute sensitiveness to the annoyance of
interruption, from whatsoever cause occurring, during his lessons: to
pass through the classe und