he Duchesse de Tarascon to assist at the soiree she
gave that night." Valerie took her father's arm with a brightening smile
and a heightened colour. Alain de Rochebriant might probably be at the
Duchesse's.

"Are you not going also to the Hotel de Tarascon, M. de Mauleon?" asked
Duplessis.

"No; I was never there but once. The Duchesse is an Imperialist, at once
devoted and acute, and no doubt very soon divined my lack of faith in
her idols."

Duplessis frowned, and hastily led Valerie away.

In a few minutes the room was comparatively deserted. De Mauleon,
however, lingered by the side of Isaura till all the other guests
were gone. Even then he lingered still, and renewed the interrupted
conversation with her, the Venosta joining therein; and so agreeable did
he make himself to her Italian tastes by a sort of bitter-sweet wisdom
like that of her native proverbs--comprising much knowledge of mankind
on the unflattering side of humanity in that form of pleasantry which
has a latent sentiment of pathos--that the Venosta exclaimed, "Surely
you must have been brought up in Florence!"

There was that in De Mauleon's talk hostile to all which we call romance
that excited the imagination of Isaura, and compelled her instinctive
love for whatever is more sweet, more beautiful, more ennobling on the
many sides of human life, to oppose what she deemed the paradoxes of
a man who had taught himself to belie even his own nature. She became
eloquent, and her countenance, which in ordinary moments owed much of
its beauty to an expression of meditative gentleness, was now lighted
up by the energy of earnest conviction--the enthusiasm of an impassioned
zeal.

Gradually De Mauleon relaxed his share in the dialogue, and listened
to her, rapt and dreamily as in his fiery youth he had listened to the
songs of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause,
though unconsciously--defending the vocation of art as the embellisher
of external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells
crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a
new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it
accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and
material nature, which is finite; for ever seeking in the unseen and
the spiritual the goals in the infinite which it is their instinct to
divine. "That which you contemptuously call romance," said Isaura, "is
not