nely with a wife who was not your companion, with whom you could not
converse on equal terms of intellect,--my dear friend, where could you
find a companion in whom you would not miss the poet-soul of Isaura?
Of course I should not dare to obtrude all these questionings on your
innermost reflection, if I had not some idea, right or wrong, that since
the days when at Enghien and Montmorency, seeing you and Isaura side by
side, I whispered to Frank, 'So should those two be through life,' some
cloud has passed between your eyes and the future on which they gazed.
Cannot that cloud be dispelled? Were you so unjust to yourself as to
be jealous of a rival, perhaps of a Gustave Rameau? I write to you
frankly--answer me frankly; and if you answer, 'Mrs. Morley, I don't
know, what you mean; I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna as I might admire
any other pretty, accomplished girl, but it is really nothing to me
whether she marries Gustave Rameau or any one else,'--why, then, burn
this letter--forget that it has been written; and may you never know
the pang of remorseful sigh, if, in the days to come, you see her--whose
name in that case I should profane did I repeat it--the comrade of
another man's mind, the half of another man's heart, the pride and
delight of another man's blissful home."

CHAPTER IV.

There is somewhere in Lord Lytton's writings--writings so numerous that
I may be pardoned if I cannot remember where-a critical definition of
the difference between dramatic and narrative art of story, instanced by
that marvellous passage in the loftiest of Sir Walter Scott's works, in
which all the anguish of Ravenswood on the night before he has to meet
Lucy's brother in mortal combat is conveyed without the spoken words
required in tragedy. It is only to be conjectured by the tramp of his
heavy boots to and fro all the night long in his solitary chamber,
heard below by the faithful Caleb. The drama could not have allowed that
treatment; the drama must have put into words, as "soliloquy," agonies
which the non-dramatic narrator knows that no soliloquy can describe.
Humbly do I imitate, then, the great master of narrative in declining
to put into words the conflict between love and reason that tortured the
heart of Graham Vane when, dropping noiselessly the letter I have just
transcribed, he covered his face with his hands and remained--I know
not how long--in the same position, his head bowed, not a sound escaping
from his li