oiced confidence between Alain and the friend, whom
till that day she had so enthusiastically loved. Hitherto she had been
answering in monosyllables all attempts of the great man to draw her
into conversation; but now, observing how Isaura blushed and looked
down, that strange faculty in women, which we men call dissimulation,
and which in them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to
carry off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced, by a sudden
burst of levity of spirit. She caught up some commonplace the Minister
had adapted to what he considered the poverty of her understanding, with
a quickness of satire which startled that grave man, and he gazed at her
astonished. Up to that moment he had secretly admired her as a girl well
brought up--as girls fresh from a French convent are supposed to be;
now, hearing her brilliant rejoinder to his stupid observation, he said
inly: "Dame! the low birth of a financier's daughter shows itself."

But, being a clever man himself, her retort put him on his mettle, and
he became, to his own amazement, brilliant himself. With that matchless
quickness which belongs to Parisians, the guests around him seized the
new esprit de conversation which had been evoked between the statesman
and the childlike girl beside him; and as they caught up the ball,
lightly flung among them, they thought within themselves how much
more sparkling the financier's pretty, lively daughter was than that
dark-eyed young muse, of whom all the journalists of Paris were writing
in a chorus of welcome and applause, and who seemed not to have a word
to say worth listening to, except to the handsome young Marquis, whom,
no doubt, she wished to fascinate.

Valerie fairly outshone Isaura in intellect and in wit; and neither
Valerie nor Isaura cared, to the value of a bean-straw, about that
distinction. Each was thinking only of the prize which the humblest
peasant women have in common with the most brilliantly accomplished of
their sex--the heart of a man beloved.

CHAPTER IV.

On the Continent generally, as we all know, men do not sit drinking wine
together after the ladies retire. So when the signal was given all the
guests adjourned to the salon; and Alain quitted Isaura to gain the ear
of the Duchesse de Tarascon.

"It is long--at, least long for Paris life," said the Marquis--"since
my first visit to you, in company with Enguerrand de Vandemar. Much that
you then said rested on my min