loy, in the excitement they sustained, and the fame to which
they conduced, Isaura would be readily consoled for a momentary pang
of disappointed affection. And that a man so alien as himself, both by
nature and by habit, from the artistic world, was the very last person
who could maintain deep and permanent impression on her actual life or
her ideal dreams. But what if, as he gathered from the words of the fair
American--what if, in all these assumptions, she was wholly mistaken?
What if, in previously revealing his own heart, he had decoyed
hers--what if, by a desertion she had no right to anticipate, he had
blighted her future? What if this brilliant child of genius could love
as warmly, as deeply, as enduringly as any simple village girl to whom
there is no poetry except love? If this were so--what became the first
claim on his honour, his conscience, his duty?

The force which but a few days ago his reasonings had given to the
arguments that forbade him to think of Isaura, became weaker and weaker,
as now in an altered mood of reflection he resummoned and reweighed
them.

All those prejudices--which had seemed to him such rational common-sense
truths, when translated from his own mind into the words of Lady Janet's
letter,--was not Mrs. Morley right in denouncing them as the crotchets
of an insolent egotism? Was it not rather to the favour than to the
disparagement of Isaura, regarded even in the man's narrow-minded view
of woman's dignity, that this orphan girl could, with character so
unscathed, pass through the trying ordeal of the public babble, the
public gaze-command alike the esteem of a woman so pure as Mrs. Morley,
the reverence of a man so chivalrously sensitive to honour as Alain de
Rochebriant?

Musing thus, Graham's countenance at last brightened--a glorious joy
entered into and possessed him. He felt as a man who had burst asunder
the swathes and trammels which had kept him galled and miserable with
the sense of captivity, and from which some wizard spell that took
strength from his own superstition had forbidden to struggle.

He was free!--and that freedom was rapture!--yes, his resolve was taken.

The day was now far advanced. He should have just time before the dinner
with Duplessis to drive to A------, where he still supposed Isaura
resided. How, as his fiacre rolled along the well-remembered road--how
completely he lived in that world of romance of which he denied himself
to be a denizen.