the siege last much longer, it is not of
the gout I shall die. Good-night to you."

CHAPTER XVI.

Isaura had, as we have seen, been hitherto saved by the siege and its
consequences from the fulfilment of her engagement to Gustave Rameau;
and since he had quitted his father's house she had not only seen less
of him, but a certain chill crept into his converse in the visits
he paid to her. The compassionate feeling his illness had excited,
confirmed by the unwonted gentleness of his mood, and the short-lived
remorse with which he spoke of his past faults and follies, necessarily
faded away in proportion as he regained that kind of febrile strength
which was his normal state of health, and with it the arrogant
self-assertion which was ingrained in his character. But it was now
more than ever that she became aware of the antagonism between all that
constituted his inner life and her own. It was not that he volunteered
in her presence the express utterance of those opinions, social or
religious, which he addressed to the public in the truculent journal to
which, under a nom de plume, he was the most inflammatory contributor.
Whether it was that he shrank from insulting the ears of the pure virgin
whom he had wooed as wife with avowals of his disdain of marriage bonds,
or perhaps from shocking yet more her womanly humanity and her religious
faith by cries for the blood of anti-republican traitors and the
downfall of Christian altars; or whether he yet clung, though with
relapsing affection, to the hold which her promise had imposed on him,
and felt that that hold would be for ever gone, and that she would
recoil from his side in terror and dismay, if she once learned that the
man who had implored her to be his saving angel from the comparatively
mild errors of youth, had so belied his assurance, so mocked her
credulity, as deliberately to enter into active warfare against all that
he knew her sentiments regarded as noble and her conscience received
as divine: despite the suppression of avowed doctrine on his part, the
total want of sympathy between these antagonistic natures made itself
felt by both--more promptly felt by Isaura. If Gustave did not frankly
announce to her in that terrible time (when all that a little later
broke out on the side of the Communists was more or less forcing ominous
way to the lips of those who talked with confidence to each other,
whether to approve or to condemn) the associates with whom