urprised to hear you."

Her own eyes opened in astonishment. "Why mayn't I look at them? It is
by the eyes that, like a dog, I know whom to like and whom to avoid."

"And pray does your prescience guide you to see a saint in a ruined
_Lion_ of the Chaussee d'Antin?" sneered Selina, with another
contemptuous sniff.

"Not a saint. I'm not good enough to appreciate the race," laughed Nina.
"But I do not believe your cousin to be all you paint him; or, at least,
if circumstances have led him into extravagance, I have a conviction
that he has a warm heart and a noble character au fond."

"We will hope so," said the Warden, meekly, with an expression which
plainly said how vain a hope it was.

"I think we have wasted a great deal too much conversation on a
thankless subject," said Selina, with asperity. "Don't you think it
time, Mr. Gordon, for us to go to the Louvre?"

That day, as they were driving along the Boulevards, they passed Ernest
with Bluette in his carriage going to the Pre Catalan: they all knew
her, from having seen her play at the Odeon. Selina and Augusta turned
down their mouths, and turned up their eyes. Gordon pulled up his
collar, and looked a Brutus in spectacles. Nina colored, and looked
vexed. Triumph glittered in Eusebius's meek eyes, but he sighed a
pastor's sigh over a lost soul.

III.

"LE LION AMOUREUX."

The morning after, as they were going into the Exposition des Beaux
Arts, they met Vaughan; and no ghost would have been more unwelcome to
the Warden than the distingue figure of his fashionable cousin. Nina was
the only one who looked pleased to recognise him, and she, as she
returned his smile, forgot that the evening before it had been given to
Bluette.

"Are you coming in too?" she asked.

"I was not, but I will with pleasure," said Ernest. And into the
Exhibition with them he went, to Ruskinstone's wrath and Gordon's
annoyance.

Vaughan was a connoisseur in art. The Warden knew no more than what he
took verbatim from the god of his idolatry, Mr. John Ruskin. It was very
natural that Nina should listen to the friend of Ingres and Vernet
instead of to the second-hand worshipper of Turner. Vaughan, by
instinct, dropped his customary tone of compliment--compliment he never
used to women he delighted to honor--and talked so charmingly, that Nina
utterly forgot the luckless Eusebius, and started when a low, sweet
voice said, close beside her, "What, Ernest, you here?"

She