was in the
midst of a sympathetic and admiring circle, and did the honors of her
own house with perfect ease, finding agreeable words and showing a
delicate forethought for each guest, and above all displaying toward
her protectress a charming deference, by which the Duchess felt herself
particularly touched.

"What a pity!" she said to herself, glancing alternately at Zibeline
and at her brother, between whom a tone of frank comradeship had been
established, free from any coquetry on her side or from gallantry on
his.

The more clearly Henri divined the thoughts of his sister, the more he
affected to remain insensible to the natural seductions of his neighbor,
to whom Lenaieff, on the contrary, addressed continually, in his soft
and caressing voice, compliments upon compliments and madrigals upon
madrigals!

"Take care, my dear Constantin!" said Henri to him, bluntly. "You will
make Mademoiselle de Vermont quite impossible. If you go on thus, she
will take herself seriously as a divinity!"

"Fortunately," rejoined Zibeline, "you are there, General, to remind
me that I am only a mortal, as Philippe's freedman reminded his master
every morning."

"You can not complain! I serve you as a confederate, to allow you
to display your erudition," retorted the General, continuing his
persiflage.

But he, too, was only a man, wavering and changeable, to use Montaigne's
expression, for his eyes, contradicting the brusqueness of his speech,
rested long, and not without envy, on this beautiful and tempting fruit
which his fate forbade him to gather. The more he admired her freshness,
and the more he inhaled her sweetness, the more the image of Eugenie
Gontier was gradually effaced from his memory, like one of those
tableaux on the stage, which gauze curtains, descending from the flies,
seem to absorb without removing, gradually obliterating the pictures as
they fall, one after another.

CHAPTER XXI. A DASHING AMAZON

On leaving the table, the fair "Amphitryonne" proposed that the
gentlemen should use her private office as a smoking-room, and the
ladies followed them thither, pretending that the odor of tobacco would
not annoy them in the least, but in reality to inspect this new room.

Edmond Delorme had finished his work that very morning, and the enormous
canvas, with its life-size subject, had already been hung, lighted from
above and below by electric bulbs, the battery for which was cleverly
hidden behind a pi