acherous festival of the Bellegardes came back to him; she struck
him as a wonderful old lady in a comedy, particularly well up in her
part. He observed before long that she asked him no questions about
their common friends; she made no allusion to the circumstances under
which he had been presented to her. She neither feigned ignorance of a
change in these circumstances nor pretended to condole with him upon it;
but she smiled and discoursed and compared the tender-tinted wools of
her tapestry, as if the Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of
this world. "She is fighting shy!" said Newman to himself; and, having
made the observation, he was prompted to observe, farther, how the
duchess would carry off her indifference. She did so in a masterly
manner. There was not a gleam of disguised consciousness in those
small, clear, demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to
personal loveliness, there was not a symptom of apprehension that Newman
would trench upon the ground she proposed to avoid. "Upon my word,
she does it very well," he tacitly commented. "They all hold together
bravely, and, whether any one else can trust them or not, they can
certainly trust each other."

Newman, at this juncture, fell to admiring the duchess for her fine
manners. He felt, most accurately, that she was not a grain less urbane
than she would have been if his marriage were still in prospect; but
he felt also that she was not a particle more urbane. He had come,
so reasoned the duchess--Heaven knew why he had come, after what had
happened; and for the half hour, therefore, she would be charmante. But
she would never see him again. Finding no ready-made opportunity to tell
his story, Newman pondered these things more dispassionately than might
have been expected; he stretched his legs, as usual, and even chuckled a
little, appreciatively and noiselessly. And then as the duchess went on
relating a mot with which her mother had snubbed the great Napoleon, it
occurred to Newman that her evasion of a chapter of French history
more interesting to himself might possibly be the result of an extreme
consideration for his feelings. Perhaps it was delicacy on the duchess's
part--not policy. He was on the point of saying something himself, to
make the chance which he had determined to give her still better, when
the servant announced another visitor. The duchess, on hearing the
name--it was that of an Italian prince--gave a little imperc