ably well. To do him justice, his parents
concealed from him the extent of their destitution; they, on their part,
not aware that he was so able to assist them, rather fearing that he
himself had nothing else for support but his scanty pay as a National
Guard. In fact, of late the parents and son had seen little of each
other. M. Rameau, though a Liberal politician, was Liberal as a
tradesman, not as a Red Republican or a Socialist. And, though little
heeding his son's theories while the Empire secured him from the
practical effect of them, he was now as sincerely frightened at the
chance of the Communists becoming rampant as most of the Parisian
tradesmen were. Madame Rameau, on her side, though she had the dislike
to aristocrats which was prevalent with her class, was a stanch Roman
Catholic; and seeing in the disasters that had befallen her country the
punishment justly incurred by its sins, could not but be shocked by the
opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author
of certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were
proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in
his conversation. She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with
passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment
Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride
and depreciating his wisdom.

Partly to avoid meeting his parents, partly because he recoiled
almost as much from the ennui of meeting the other visitors at her
apartments--the Paris ladies associated with her in the ambulance, Raoul
de Vandeniar, whom he especially hated, and the Abbe Vertpre, who had
recently come into intimate friendship with both the Italian ladies--his
visits to Isaura had become exceedingly rare. He made his incessant
military duties the pretext for absenting himself; and now, on this
evening, there were gathered round Isaura's hearth--on which burned
almost the last of the hoarded fuel--the Venosta, the two Rameaus, the
Abbe Vertpre, who was attached as confessor to the society of which
Isaura was so zealous a member. The old priest and the young poetess had
become dear friends. There is in the nature of a woman (and especially
of a woman at once so gifted and so childlike as Isaura, combining
an innate tendency towards faith with a restless inquisitiveness of
intellect, which is always suggesting query or doubt) a craving for
something afar from the sphere of her sor