conjure away with a word, a glance, or a gesture.

"Will you come tomorrow evening?" she asked. "I am going to a ball, but
I shall stay at home for you until ten o'clock."

Montriveau spent most of the next day in smoking an indeterminate
quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours
till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had
known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to
see him grown so small, so distrustful of himself; the mind that might
have shed light over undiscovered worlds shrunk to the proportions of
a she-coxcomb's boudoir. Even he himself felt that he had fallen so low
already in his happiness that to save his life he could not have told
his love to one of his closest friends. Is there not always a trace
of shame in the lover's bashfulness, and perhaps in woman a certain
exultation over diminished masculine stature? Indeed, but for a host of
motives of this kind, how explain why women are nearly always the first
to betray the secret?--a secret of which, perhaps, they soon weary.

"Mme la Duchesse cannot see visitors, monsieur," said the man; "she is
dressing, she begs you to wait for her here."

Armand walked up and down the drawing-room, studying her taste in the
least details. He admired Mme de Langeais herself in the objects of her
choosing; they revealed her life before he could grasp her personality
and ideas. About an hour later the Duchess came noiselessly out of her
chamber. Montriveau turned, saw her flit like a shadow across the room,
and trembled. She came up to him, not with a bourgeoise's enquiry, "How
do I look?" She was sure of herself; her steady eyes said plainly, "I am
adorned to please you."

No one surely, save the old fairy godmother of some princess in
disguise, could have wound a cloud of gauze about the dainty throat, so
that the dazzling satin skin beneath should gleam through the gleaming
folds. The Duchess was dazzling. The pale blue colour of her gown,
repeated in the flowers in her hair, appeared by the richness of its hue
to lend substance to a fragile form grown too wholly ethereal; for as
she glided towards Armand, the loose ends of her scarf floated about
her, putting that valiant warrior in mind of the bright damosel flies
that hover now over water, now over the flowers with which they seem to
mingle and blend.

"I have kept you waiting," she said, with the tone that a woman can
always bring in