gaiety
of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and
eagerness of youth.

It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening
waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot
temples. He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in
the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not. "It
functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he
reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had
announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would
approve.

"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that
they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took
it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's so
certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"

It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine
held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the
Place Vendome. One of the things he had stipulated--almost the only
one--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris,
he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."

"Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed. "I'll take
you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving his
father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and
emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for
its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the
scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and
he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's
life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had
gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the
avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public
gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll
of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and
pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle
was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy,
old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....

Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "Hullo, father: this
is somet