atisfaction to him (he
enjoyed it very clandestinely) to have interposed, pecuniarily, in
a scheme of pleasure. To set a large group of people in motion and
transport them to a distance, to have special conveyances, to charter
railway-carriages and steamboats, harmonized with his relish for
bold processes, and made hospitality seem more active and more to the
purpose. A few evenings before the occasion of which I speak he had
invited several ladies and gentlemen to the opera to listen to Madame
Alboni--a party which included Miss Dora Finch. It befell, however, that
Miss Dora Finch, sitting near Newman in the box, discoursed brilliantly,
not only during the entr'actes, but during many of the finest portions
of the performance, so that Newman had really come away with an
irritated sense that Madame Alboni had a thin, shrill voice, and that
her musical phrase was much garnished with a laugh of the giggling
order. After this he promised himself to go for a while to the opera
alone.

When the curtain had fallen upon the first act of "Don Giovanni" he
turned round in his place to observe the house. Presently, in one of
the boxes, he perceived Urbain de Bellegarde and his wife. The little
marquise was sweeping the house very busily with a glass, and Newman,
supposing that she saw him, determined to go and bid her good evening.
M. de Bellegarde was leaning against a column, motionless, looking
straight in front of him, with one hand in the breast of his white
waistcoat and the other resting his hat on his thigh. Newman was about
to leave his place when he noticed in that obscure region devoted to the
small boxes which in France are called, not inaptly, "bathing-tubs,"
a face which even the dim light and the distance could not make wholly
indistinct. It was the face of a young and pretty woman, and it was
surmounted with a coiffure of pink roses and diamonds. This person was
looking round the house, and her fan was moving to and fro with the most
practiced grace; when she lowered it, Newman perceived a pair of plump
white shoulders and the edge of a rose-colored dress. Beside her, very
close to the shoulders and talking, apparently with an earnestness which
it pleased her scantily to heed, sat a young man with a red face and a
very low shirt-collar. A moment's gazing left Newman with no doubts; the
pretty young woman was Noemie Nioche. He looked hard into the depths of
the box, thinking her father might perhaps be in attendance