find a companion in whom you would not miss the poet-soul of Isaura?
Of course I should not dare to obtrude all these questionings on your
innermost reflection, if I had not some idea, right or wrong, that since
the days when at Enghien and Montmorency, seeing you and Isaura side by
side, I whispered to Frank, 'So should those two be through life,' some
cloud has passed between your eyes and the future on which they gazed.
Cannot that cloud be dispelled? Were you so unjust to yourself as to be
jealous of a rival, perhaps of a Gustave Rameau? I write to you frankly
--answer me frankly; and if you answer, 'Mrs. Morley, I don't know, what
you mean; I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna as I might admire any other
pretty, accomplished girl, but it is really nothing to me whether she
marries Gustave Rameau or any one else,'--why, then, burn this letter--
forget that it has been written; and may you never know the pang of
remorseful sigh, if, in the days to come, you see her--whose name in that
case I should profane did I repeat it--the comrade of another man's mind,
the half of another man's heart, the pride and delight of another man's
blissful home."




CHAPTER IV.

There is somewhere in Lord Lytton's writings--writings so numerous that I
may be pardoned if I cannot remember where-a critical definition of the
difference between dramatic and narrative art of story, instanced by that
marvellous passage in the loftiest of Sir Walter Scott's works, in which
all the anguish of Ravenswood on the night before he has to meet Lucy's
brother in mortal combat is conveyed without the spoken words required in
tragedy. It is only to be conjectured by the tramp of his heavy boots to