ied M. de Bellegarde, "but splendor, and
harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration."

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, "So it IS very ugly?" he
inquired.

"Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent."

"That is the same thing, I suppose," said Newman. "Make yourself
comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship.
You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you,
it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like
to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you
explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don't want to lose
anything, myself."

M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid
his hand on Newman's sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something,
but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffed
at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence,--"Certainly," he said,
"my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I was in a
measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request from
my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lights
in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for
making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I was
not performing a mere ceremony."

"Well, here I am as large as life," said Newman, extending his legs.

"I don't know what you mean," the young man went on "by giving me
unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is
better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we
may laugh together--or separately--that I have, I may say, sought your
acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!"
All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness
of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, of
the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its
harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity.
Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de
Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him
on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a
"How-d'ye-do, Mosseer?" But there was something in his physiognomy which
seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced
by difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust