e or that
of any member of my family could be mixed up."

"Marquis, it is to prevent the possibility of all scandal that I ask you
to trust these letters to my discretion."

"Foi de gentilhomme?"

"Foi de gentilhomme!"

"Take them. When and where shall we meet again?"

"Soon, I trust; but I must leave Paris this evening. I am bound to
Berlin in quest of this Countess von Rudesheim: and I fear that in a
very few days intercourse between France and the German frontier will be
closed upon travellers."

After a few more words not worth recording, the two young men shook
hands and parted.

CHAPTER V.

It was with an interest languid and listless indeed, compared with
that which he would have felt a day before, that Graham mused over the
remarkable advances towards the discovery of Louise Duval which were
made in the letters he had perused. She had married, then, first a
foreigner, whom she spoke of as noble, and whose name and residence
could be easily found through the Countess von Rudesheim. The marriage
did not seem to have been a happy one. Left a widow in reduced
circumstances, she had married again, evidently without affection. She
was living so late as 1861, and she had children living is 1859: was the
child referred to by Richard King one of them?

The tone and style of the letters served to throw some light on the
character of the writer: they evinced pride, stubborn self-will, and
unamiable hardness of nature; but her rejection of all pecuniary aid
from a man like the late Marquis de Rochebriant betokened a certain
dignity of sentiment. She was evidently, whatever her strange ideas
about her first marriage with Richard King, no vulgar woman of
gallantry; and there must have been some sort of charm about her to
have excited a friendly interest in a kinsman so remote, and a man of
pleasure so selfish, as her high-born correspondent.

But what now, so far as concerned his own happiness, was the hope, the
probable certainty, of a speedy fulfilment of the trust bequeathed to
him? Whether the result, in the death of the mother, and more especially
of the child, left him rich, or, if the last survived, reduced his
fortune to a modest independence, Isaura was equally lost to him, and
fortune became valueless. But his first emotions on recovering from the
shock of hearing from Isaura's lips that she was irrevocably affianced
to another, were not those of self-reproach. They were those of intense
bitterne