You would forgive
could you read my heart. No matter. Every sentiment in that letter,
except those which conveyed admiration, I retract. Be mine, and instead
of presuming to check in you the irresistible impulse of genius to the
first place in the head or the heart of the world, I teach myself to
encourage, to share, to exult in it. Do you know what a difference there
is between the absent one and the present one--between the distant image
against whom our doubts, our fears, our suspicions, raise up hosts of
imaginary giants, barriers of visionary walls, and the beloved face
before the sight of which the hosts are fled, the walls are vanished?
Isaura, we meet again. You know now from my own lips that I love you.
I think your lips will not deny that you love me. You say that you are
affianced to another. Tell the man frankly, honestly, that you mistook
your heart. It is not yours to give. Save yourself, save him, from a
union in which there can be no happiness."

"It is too late," said Isaura, with hollow tones, but with no trace of
vacillating weakness on her brow and lips. "Did I say now to that other
one, 'I break the faith that I pledged to you,' I should kill him, body
and soul. Slight thing though I be, to him I am all in all; to you, Mr.
Vane, to you a memory--the memory of one whom a year, perhaps a month,
hence, you will rejoice to think you have escaped."

She passed from him--passed away from the flowers and the starlight; and
when Graham,--recovering from the stun of her crushing words, and with
the haughty mien and stop of the man who goes forth from the ruin of his
hopes, leaning for support upon his pride,--when Graham re-entered
the room, all the guests had departed save only Alain, who was still
exchanging whispered words with Valerie.

CHAPTER IV.

The next day, at the hour appointed, Graham entered Alain's apartment.
"I am glad to tell you," said the Marquis, gaily, "that the box has
arrived, and we will very soon examine its contents. Breakfast claims
precedence." During the meal Alain was in gay spirits, and did not at
first notice the gloomy countenance and abstracted mood of his guest. At
length, surprised at the dull response to his lively sallies on the part
of a man generally so pleasant in the frankness of his speech, and
the cordial ring of his sympathetic laugh, it occurred to him that the
change in Graham must be ascribed to something that had gone wrong in
the meeting with Isaura