irculated twice or thrice
a week throughout Paris. From him, too, she learned the names of the
various English who each day arrived in Paris from Verdun, and thus
contrived to have a succession of those favored guests at her dinner and
evening parties.

During all this time, as I have said, my intimacy with mademoiselle
advanced but slowly, and certainly showed slight prospect of verifying
the prophecy of Duchesne at parting. Her manner had, indeed, lost its
cold and haughty tone; but in lieu of it there was a flippant, half
impertinent, _moqueur_ spirit, which, however easily turned to advantage
by a man of the world like the chevalier, was terribly disconcerting to
a less forward and less enterprising person like myself. Dobretski still
continued an invalid; and although she never mentioned his name nor
alluded to him in any instance, I could see that she suspected I knew
something more of his illness and the cause of it than I had ever
confessed. It matters little what the subject of it be, let a secret
once exist between a young man and a young woman,--let there be the
tacit understanding that they mutually know of something of which others
are in ignorance,--and from that moment a species of intelligence is
established between them of the most dangerous kind. They may not be
disposed to like each other; there may be attachments elsewhere; there
may be a hundred reasons why love should not enter into the case; yet
will there be a conscious sense of this hidden link which binds them;
strangely at variance with their ordinary regard for each other,
eternally mingling in all their intercourse, and suggesting modes
of acting and thinking at variance with the true tenor of the
acquaintanceship.

Such, then, was my position at the Hotel Clichy, at which I was almost
daily a visitor or a guest, in the morning, to hear the chit-chat of the
day,--the changes talked of in the administration, the intended plans of
the Emperor, or the last modes in dress introduced by the Empress, whose
taste in costume and extravagant habits were much more popular with the
tradespeople than with Napoleon.

An illness of a few days' duration had confined me to the Luxembourg,
and unhappily deprived me of the Court ball, for which I had received
my invitation several weeks before. It seemed as if my fate forbade any
chance of my ever seeing her once more whose presence in Paris was the
great hope I held out to myself when coming. Already a ru