to achieve a personal success. If he could have looked down at
the scene, invisible, from a hole in the roof, he would have enjoyed it
quite as much. It would have spoken to him about his own prosperity and
deepened that easy feeling about life to which, sooner or later, he made
all experience contribute. Just now the cup seemed full.

"It is a very pretty party," said Mrs. Tristram, after they had walked
a while. "I have seen nothing objectionable except my husband leaning
against the wall and talking to an individual whom I suppose he takes
for a duke, but whom I more than suspect to be the functionary who
attends to the lamps. Do you think you could separate them? Knock over a
lamp!"

I doubt whether Newman, who saw no harm in Tristram's conversing with an
ingenious mechanic, would have complied with this request; but at this
moment Valentin de Bellegarde drew near. Newman, some weeks previously,
had presented Madame de Cintre's youngest brother to Mrs. Tristram, for
whose merits Valentin professed a discriminating relish and to whom he
had paid several visits.

"Did you ever read Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci?" asked Mrs. Tristram.
"You remind me of the hero of the ballad:--

'Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?'"

"If I am alone, it is because I have been deprived of your society,"
said Valentin. "Besides it is good manners for no man except Newman to
look happy. This is all to his address. It is not for you and me to go
before the curtain."

"You promised me last spring," said Newman to Mrs. Tristram, "that six
months from that time I should get into a monstrous rage. It seems to
me the time's up, and yet the nearest I can come to doing anything rough
now is to offer you a cafe glace."

"I told you we should do things grandly," said Valentin. "I don't allude
to the cafes glaces. But every one is here, and my sister told me just
now that Urbain had been adorable."

"He's a good fellow, he's a good fellow," said Newman. "I love him as a
brother. That reminds me that I ought to go and say something polite to
your mother."

"Let it be something very polite indeed," said Valentin. "It may be the
last time you will feel so much like it!"

Newman walked away, almost disposed to clasp old Madame de Bellegarde
round the waist. He passed through several rooms and at last found
the old marquise in the first saloon, seated on a sofa, with her young
kinsman, Lord Deepmere,