f the Prince,
though he had not unfrequently blamed his somewhat lax principles.
Whenever he discovered the Prince in any peccadillo, he used to say,
"Well, we must be lenient to youth." Now, the Prince de Maulear was a
young man of seventy. The beauty of Aminta, her extreme paleness alone,
would have sufficed to fix attention, and created a very revolution in
the saloons of the Embassy. The Duchess of Palma did not produce her
ordinary effect. The animation she experienced in the beginning of the
evening gradually left her, and the sadness under which she had
previously suffered, but which she had thrown off during the early hours
of the entertainment, began again to take possession of her features and
person. One man alone remarked the Duchess, for he had never lost sight
of her. Leaning against the door of the boudoir, his eye followed her
wherever she went, and appeared to sympathize with all the constraint
inflicted on her as mistress of the house. When, however, the Duchess
thought she had paid sufficient personal attention, and was satisfied
that the pleasures of the evening would be sustained without her, the
man who examined her with such care, saw her come towards the boudoir
where he was. He went in without being seen by her, and yielding to one
of those promptings which a man in his cooler moments would resist, went
behind a drapery which covered a door leading into a gallery of
pictures, and waited motionless. The Duchess of Palma entered the
boudoir, and assuring herself by a glance that she was alone, fell
rather than sat on a divan, and suffered two streams of tears to flow
from her eyes. "I was strangling," said she. "I would die a thousand
deaths. My cruel experiment has succeeded. _He loves her yet_--I am sure
of it. For her sake he came to this entertainment, to which he would not
have come for mine. He would have made an excuse of his old difficulties
with the Duke, of his political position. I would have believed him, and
have sacrificed my wish to see him to propriety and his honor. He never
ceases to look at her. He thinks of her alone. He is busied with her
alone, yet he has no look, no thought for me." The Duchess began to weep
again. Steps were heard in the gallery--the drapery at the door was
agitated. "Oh, my God!" said the Duchess, "if met with here, and in this
condition, what shall I do and say!" The steps approached. Hurrying then
to one of the outlets of the boudoir, she opened it hastily