at is the matter?" asked d'Arthez; "you seem distressed."

"I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan," she replied.
"However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of his
exile--without family, without son--from his native land."

These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.
D'Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to
speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the
height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus
forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with
frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels.
Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first
tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself, trembled
as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful Diane with its
curving finger-tips, and said,--

"Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have suffered?"

"Yes," she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous
note that Tulou's flute had ever sighed.

Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained
in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the
occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly
dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb
was kneeling at the divine feet.

"Well?" he said, in a soft, still voice.

Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly,
dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but a
monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful
undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming
head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.

"Can I? ought I?" she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at
d'Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness. "Men have so
little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little
bound to be discreet!"

"Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?" cried d'Arthez.

"Oh, friend!" she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an
involuntary avowal, "when a woman attaches herself for life, think you
she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you
anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak. I would
willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am at my age;
but