t
to guard themselves against being too irresistible to the fair sex; and
each says of his friend, "Good fellow enough, but the last man for that
woman to fall in love with!"

But certainly there appeared on the surface more than ordinary cause for
Harley's blindness in the special instance of Leonard.

Whatever Beatrice's better qualities, she was generally esteemed worldly
and ambitious. She was pinched in circumstances, she was luxuriant and
extravagant; how was it likely that she could distinguish any aspirant
of the humble birth and fortunes of the young peasant-author? As a
coquette, she might try to win his admiration and attract his fancy;
but her own heart would surely be guarded in the triple mail of pride,
poverty, and the conventional opinions of the world in which she lived.
Had Harley thought it possible that Madame di Negra could stoop below
her station, and love, not wisely, but too well, he would rather have
thought that the object would be some brilliant adventurer of fashion,
some one who could turn against herself all the arts of deliberate
fascination, and all the experience bestowed by frequent conquest. One
so simple as Leonard, so young and so new! Harley L'Estrange would have
smiled at himself, if the idea of that image subjugating the ambitious
woman to the disinterested love of a village maid had once crossed his
mind. Nevertheless, so it was, and precisely from those causes which
would have seemed to Harley to forbid the weakness.

It was that fresh, pure heart, it was that simple, earnest sweetness, it
was that contrast in look, in tone, in sentiment, and in reasonings, to
all that had jaded and disgusted her in the circle of her admirers,--it
was all this that captivated Beatrice at the first interview with
Leonard. Here was what she had confessed to the sceptical Randal she
had dreamed and sighed for. Her earliest youth had passed into abhorrent
marriage, without the soft, innocent crisis of human life,--virgin love.
Many a wooer might have touched her vanity, pleased her fancy, excited
her ambition--her heart had never been awakened; it woke now. The world,
and the years that the world had wasted, seemed to fleet away as a
cloud. She was as if restored to the blush and the sigh of youth,--the
youth of the Italian maid. As in the restoration of our golden age
is the spell of poetry with us all, so such was the spell of the poet
himself on her.

Oh, how exquisite was that brief episode