ns of a society paper.

After the agitation of this unhappy match, the anxieties of the last
illness, and the sudden death which for a moment revived her former
affection, the first months of her widowhood acted on the young woman
like a healthy calming water-cure. The enforced retirement, the quiet
charm of mitigated sorrow, lent to her thirty-five years a second youth
almost as attractive as the first.

[Illustration: p167-178]

Moreover black suited her, and then she had the responsible and rather
proud look of a woman left alone in life, with all the weight of a great
name to carry honourably. Mindful of the fame of the departed one, that
wretched fame that had cost her so many tears, and now grew day by day,
like a magnificent flower nourished by the black earth of the tomb, she
was to be seen draped in her long sombre veils holding interviews with
theatrical managers and publishers, busying herself in getting her
husband's operas put again on the stage, superintending the printing of
his posthumous works and unfinished manuscripts, bestowing on all these
details a kind of solemn care and as it were the respect for a shrine.

It was at this moment that her second husband met her. He too was a
musician, almost unknown it is true, the author of a few waltzes
and songs, and of two little operas, of which the scores, charmingly
printed, were scarcely more played than sold. With a pleasant
countenance, a handsome fortune that he owed to his exceedingly
_bourgeois_ family, he had above all an infinite respect for genius,
a curiosity about famous men, and the ingenuous enthusiasm of a still
youthful artist. Thus when he met the wife of the great man, he was
dazzled and bewildered. It was as though the image of the glorious muse
herself had appeared to him. He at once fell in love, and as the widow
was beginning to receive a few friends, he had himself presented to her.
There his passion grew in the atmosphere of genius that still lingered
in all the corners of the drawing-room. There was the bust of the
master, the piano he composed on, his scores spread over all the
furniture, melodious even to look at, as though from between their
half-opened pages, the written phrases re-echoed musically. The actual
and very real charm of the widow surrounded by those austere memories as
by a frame that became her, brought his love to a climax.

[Illustration: p169-180]

After hesitating a long time, the poor fellow at last propo