y alone. For some days I saw little of him, though we met
at the Kursaal and strolled occasionally in the park. I watched, in
spite of my desire to let him alone, for the signs and portents of the
world's action upon him--of that portion of the world, in especial, of
which Madame Blumenthal had constituted herself the agent. He seemed
very happy, and gave me in a dozen ways an impression of increased self-
confidence and maturity. His mind was admirably active, and always,
after a quarter of an hour's talk with him, I asked myself what
experience could really do, that innocence had not done, to make it
bright and fine. I was struck with his deep enjoyment of the whole
spectacle of foreign life--its novelty, its picturesqueness, its light
and shade--and with the infinite freedom with which he felt he could go
and come and rove and linger and observe it all. It was an expansion, an
awakening, a coming to moral manhood. Each time I met him he spoke a
little less of Madame Blumenthal; but he let me know generally that he
saw her often, and continued to admire her. I was forced to admit to
myself, in spite of preconceptions, that if she were really the ruling
star of this happy season, she must be a very superior woman. Pickering
had the air of an ingenuous young philosopher sitting at the feet of an
austere muse, and not of a sentimental spendthrift dangling about some
supreme incarnation of levity.

CHAPTER II.

Madame Blumenthal seemed, for the time, to have abjured the Kursaal, and
I never caught a glimpse of her. Her young friend, apparently, was an
interesting study, and the studious mind prefers seclusion.

She reappeared, however, at last, one evening at the opera, where from my
chair I perceived her in a box, looking extremely pretty. Adelina Patti
was singing, and after the rising of the curtain I was occupied with the
stage; but on looking round when it fell for the _entr'acte_, I saw that
the authoress of "Cleopatra" had been joined by her young admirer. He
was sitting a little behind her, leaning forward, looking over her
shoulder and listening, while she, slowly moving her fan to and fro and
letting her eye wander over the house, was apparently talking of this
person and that. No doubt she was saying sharp things; but Pickering was
not laughing; his eyes were following her covert indications; his mouth
was half open, as it always was when he was interested; he looked
intensely serious. I