d the journalist. "Why don't she
marry, Lucien?"

"How the devil should I know!" replied the Secretary in great confusion.
"You don't suppose I ever asked her the question, do you?"

"Upon my word," exclaimed the Count, laughing, "I shall begin to think
you have, if you take it so warmly. But, hist! the bell! The curtain
rises. We mustn't lose the third act of Donizetti's chef d'oeuvre,
with such a Lucrezia, for any woman living."

But it was very evident that much of the magnificent performance of the
debutante and her companion, in the thrilling scene between the Duke and
Duchess of Ferrara and the young Captain Gennaro, was lost to the
Secretary.

"Do you observe, Beauchamp, how strangely fascinated with the new
cantatrice seems the young officer of the Spahis who accompanies the
Countess?" he whispered. "Do but look. He sits like one transfixed."

"And the Countess seems transfixed also, though not by the same object,"
was the reply. "How excessively pale, yet how beautiful she is! That
plain black dress, without ornament or jewel, and her raven hair, parted
simply on her forehead, enhance her voluptuous charms infinitely more
than could the most gorgeous costume. Heavens! what a happy man will he
be who can call her his!"

"Amen!" said Debray, and the word seemed to rise from the very depths of
his heart. "But she will never marry. Some early disappointment, even
before her union with Morcerf, has withered her heart, and the terrible
divorce which parted her from him, although she never loved him, will
keep her single forever. Her first and only love is either dead
or--worse--married to another."

"See, see, Lucien!" cried Beauchamp, hurriedly; "at whom does she gaze
so intently, and yet so sadly? It cannot be Lamartine, for there sits
his lovely young English wife at his side; nor can it be old Arago, nor
young Le Verrier; and yet some one in that box it surely is."

"M. Dantes?" cried Debray.

"Impossible! That man seems hardly conscious that there are such beings
as women. His whole soul is in affairs of state."

"His whole soul seems somewhere else just at present," exclaimed the
Secretary, bitterly. "Look!"

"How dreadfully pale he is!" said Beauchamp; "and yet his eyes fairly
blaze. Is it the Countess he gazes at?"

"Is it M. Dantes she gazes at?"

At that moment, amid the wild farewell of the mother to her son, upon
the stage, the curtain came down, and at the same instant, M. Dantes
hastily