ve as economically as before in his old
apartments, and bore with an astonishing meekness of resignation the
unsolicited load of fashion heaped upon his shoulders. At heart he was
restless and unhappy. The mission bequeathed to him by Richard King
haunted his thoughts like a spectre not to be exorcised. Was his whole
life to be passed in the weary sustainment of an imposture which in
itself was gall and wormwood to a nature constitutionally frank and
open? Was he forever to appear a rich man and live as a poor one? Was he
till his deathbed to be deemed a sordid miser whenever he refused a just
claim on his supposed wealth, and to feel his ambition excluded from the
objects it earnestly coveted, and which he was forced to appear too much
of an Epicurean philosopher to prize?

More torturing than all else to the man's innermost heart was the
consciousness that he had not conquered, could not conquer, the yearning
love with which Isaura had inspired him, and yet that against such love
all his reasonings, all his prejudices, more stubbornly than ever were
combined. In the French newspapers which he had glanced over while
engaged in his researches in Germany-nay, in German critical journals
themselves--he had seen so many notices of the young author,--highly
eulogistic, it is true, but which to his peculiar notions were more
offensive than if they had been sufficiently condemnatory of her work
to discourage her from its repetition; notices which seemed to him the
supreme impertinences which no man likes exhibited towards the woman to
whom he would render the chivalrous homage of respect. Evidently this
girl had become as much public property as if she had gone on the stage.
Minute details of her personal appearance,--of the dimples on her cheek,
of the whiteness of her arms, of her peculiar way of dressing her hair;
anecdotes of her from childhood (of course invented, but how could
Graham know that?); of the reasons why she had adopted the profession of
author instead of that of the singer; of the sensation she had created
in certain salons (to Graham, who knew Paris so well, salons in which he
would not have liked his wife to appear); of the compliments paid to her
by grands seigneurs noted for their liaisons with ballet-dancers, or by
authors whose genius soared far beyond the flammantia maenia of a world
confined by respect for one's neighbours' land-marks,--all this, which
belongs to ground of personal gossip untouched by