s orchestra, and I have a family duty to fulfil:
my sister Mary has promised to dance this contradance with me, and I
must humor the whim of a spoiled child."

The wild young man hurried to take his sister's arm, and to get into
place with her. Marie d'Harcourt, Rene's sister, was a charming girl,
with blonde hair and a rosy complexion, fair and lithe as a northern
elf. The blue veins were visible beneath her transparent skin, so fair
that one might often have fancied the blood was about to come gushing
through it. The Duke d'Harcourt had lost two of his sons of that
terrible pulmonary disease against which medicine, alas, is powerless.
The distress of the father was intense, for two of the scions of this
family had been cut off by death; and of the five offshoots from the
family tree, but two remained. All his love was therefore centred in
Rene, now his only son, and in Marie, the young girl of whom we have
just spoken. From a sentiment of tender respect, the Duke had not
permitted his last son to assume the title of those he had lost, and
Rene continued to be called the Vicompte d'Harcourt. There were already
apparent sad indications that Rene would become a prey to the monster
which had devoured his two brothers: Marie, a few years younger, gave
her father great uneasiness, on account of the excessive delicacy of her
constitution and organization. All Paris had participated in the grief
of the Duke d'Harcourt; for all Paris respected him. Rich, kind, and
benevolent, in an enlightened manner, and within the bounds of reason,
rejecting all social Utopias, popular as they might make all who
sustained them, the Duke d'Harcourt was a Christian philanthropist, that
is to say, a charitable man. Charity is the holiest and purest of
earthly virtues, and that in which this patriarch indulged shunned noise
and renown. He did not wait until misfortune came to him to soothe it,
but sought it out. When this second providence was known to those whom
he aided, the Duke imposed secrecy on them as a reward for all he had
done. He was, so to say, an impersonation of French honor, and the
arbiter of all the differences which arose between the members of the
great aristocratic families of France. His word was law, and his
decisions sovereign.

The Prince de Maulear had determined to marry his son to the daughter of
this noble old man, and had been forced by the Marquis's marriage to
abandon the plan. The Duke still remained the friend o