of your truest friends--which I certainly am--it simply means, that no
matter how such a visit would please me, it does not please yourself. I
call that abominably rude and ungrateful.

"But I am not writing merely to scold you. I have something else on my
mind, and it must come out. Certainly, when you were at Paris last year
you did admire, above all other young ladies, Isaura Cicogna. And I
honoured you for doing so. I know no other young lady to be called her
equal. Well, if you admired her then, what would you do now if you met
her? Then she was but a girl--very brilliant, very charming, it is true
--but undeveloped, untested. Now she is a woman, a princess among women,
but retaining all that is most lovable in a girl; so courted, yet so
simple--so gifted, yet so innocent. Her head is not a bit turned by all
the flattery that surrounds her. Come and judge for yourself. I still
hold the door of the rooms destined to you open for repentance.

"My dear Mr. Vane, do not think me a silly match-making little woman,
when I write to you thus, _a coeur ouvert_.

"I like you so much that I would fain secure to you the rarest prize which
life is ever likely to offer to your ambition. Where can you hope to
find another Isaura? Among the stateliest daughters of your English
dukes, where is there one whom a proud man would be more proud to show to
the world, saying, 'She is mine!' where one more distinguished--I will
not say by mere beauty, there she might be eclipsed--but by sweetness and
dignity combined--in aspect, manner, every movement, every smile?

"And you, who are yourself so clever, so well read--you who would be so
lonely with a wife who was not your companion, with whom you could not
converse on equal terms of intellect,--my dear friend, where could you