dleness exaggerates the strength of any fancy over which it dreamily
broods. Isaura Cicogna has her occupations--her genius--her fame--her
career. Honestly speaking, I think that in these she will find a
happiness that no quiet hearth could bestow. I will say no more. I feel
persuaded that were we two united I could not make her happy. With the
irresistible impulse that urges the genius of the writer towards its
vent in public sympathy and applause, she would chafe if I said, 'Be
contented to be wholly mine.' And if I said it not, and felt I had no
right to say it, and allowed the full scope to her natural ambition,
what then? She would chafe yet more to find that I had no fellowship in
her aims and ends--that where I should feel pride, I felt humiliation.
It would be so; I cannot help it, 'tis my nature."

"So be it then. When, next year perhaps, you visit Paris, you will
be safe from my officious interference! Isaura will be the wife of
another."

Graham pressed his hand to his heart with the sudden movement of one who
feels there an agonising spasm--his cheek, his very lips were bloodless.

"I told you," he said bitterly, "that your fears of my influence over
the happiness of one so gifted, and so strong in such gifts, were
groundless; you allow that I should be very soon forgotten?"

"I allow no such thing--I wish I could. But do you know so little of a
woman's heart (and in matters of heart, I never yet heard that genius
had a talisman against emotion),--do you know so little of a woman's
heart as not to know that the very moment in which she may accept a
marriage the least fitted to render her happy, is that in which she has
lost all hope of happiness in another?"

"Is it indeed so?" murmured Graham--"Ay, I can conceive it."

"And have you so little comprehension of the necessities which that
fame, that career to which you allow she is impelled by the instincts of
genius, impose on this girl, young, beautiful, fatherless, motherless?
No matter how pure her life, can she guard it from the slander of
envious tongues? Will not all her truest friends--would not you, if you
were her brother--press upon her by all the arguments that have most
weight with the woman who asserts independence in her modes of life, and
yet is wise enough to know that the world can only judge of virtue by
its shadow--reputation, not to dispense with the protection which a
husband can alone secure? And that is why I warn you, if it be yet