choice
before me that between her and ambition and wealth, how soon it would be
made! Ambition has no prize equal to the heart of such a woman; wealth
no sources of joy equal to the treasures of her love."

CHAPTER III.

FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

The day after I posted my last, Mr. Vane called on us. I was in
our little garden at the time. Our conversation was brief, and soon
interrupted by visitors,--the Savarins and M. Rameau. I long for your
answer. I wonder how he impressed you, if you have met him; how he would
impress, if you met him now. To me he is so different from all others;
and I scarcely know why his words ring in my ears, and his image rests
in my thoughts. It is strange altogether; for though he is young,
he speaks to me as if he were so much older than I,--so kindly, so
tenderly, yet as if I were a child, and much as the dear Maestro might
do, if he thought I needed caution or counsel. Do not fancy, Eulalie,
that there is any danger of my deceiving myself as to the nature of such
interest as he may take in me. Oh, no! There is a gulf between us there
which he does not lose sight of, and which we could not pass. How,
indeed, I could interest him at all, I cannot guess. A rich, high-born
Englishman, intent on political life; practical, prosaic--no, not
prosaic; but still with the kind of sense which does not admit into its
range of vision that world of dreams which is familiar as their daily
home to Romance and to Art. It has always seemed to me that for love,
love such as I conceive it, there must be a deep and constant sympathy
between two persons,--not, indeed, in the usual and ordinary trifles
of taste and sentiment, but in those essentials which form the root of
character, and branch out in all the leaves and blooms that expand to
the sunshine and shrink from the cold,--that the worldling should wed
the worldling, the artist the artist. Can the realist and the idealist
blend together, and hold together till death and beyond death? If not,
can there be true love between them?

By true love, I mean the love which interpenetrates the soul, and once
given can never die. Oh, Eulalie, answer me, answer!

P. S.--I have now fully made up my mind to renounce all thought of the
stage.

FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TOISAURA CICOGNA.

MY DEAR CHILD,--how your mind has grown since you left me, the sanguine
and aspiring votary of an art which, of all arts, brings the most
immedia