ommonly is in that of
most true orators, a wonderful degree of intellectual conscience which
impelled him to acknowledge the benignant influences of song, and to
set before the young singer the noblest incentives to the profession
to which he deemed her assuredly destined; but in so doing he must have
felt that he was widening the gulf between her life and his own. Perhaps
he wished to widen it in proportion as he dreaded to listen to any voice
in his heart which asked if the gulf might not be overleapt.

CHAPTER II.

ON the morrow Graham called at the villa at A------. The two ladies
received him in Isaura's chosen sitting-room.

Somehow or other, conversation at first languished. Graham was reserved
and distant, Isaura shy and embarrassed. The Venosta had the frais of
making talk to herself. Probably at another time Graham would have been
amused and interested in the observation of a character new to him,
and thoroughly southern,--lovable not more from its naive simplicity of
kindliness than from various little foibles and vanities, all of which
were harmless, and some of them endearing as those of a child whom it is
easy to make happy, and whom it seems so cruel to pain; and with all the
Venosta's deviations from the polished and tranquil good taste of the
beau monde, she had that indescribable grace which rarely deserts a
Florentine, so that you might call her odd but not vulgar; while, though
uneducated, except in the way of her old profession, and never having
troubled herself to read anything but a libretto and the pious books
commended to her by her confessor, the artless babble of her talk
every now and then flashed out with a quaint humour, lighting up terse
fragments of the old Italian wisdom which had mysteriously embedded
themselves in the groundwork of her mind.

But Graham was not at this time disposed to judge the poor Venosta
kindly or fairly. Isaura had taken high rank in his thoughts. He felt an
impatient resentment mingled with anxiety and compassionate tenderness
at a companionship which seemed to him derogatory to the position he
would have assigned to a creature so gifted, and unsafe as a guide
amidst the perils and trials to which the youth, the beauty, and
the destined profession of Isaura were exposed. Like most
Englishmen--especially Englishmen wise in the knowledge of life--he
held in fastidious regard the proprieties and conventions by which
the dignity of woman is fenced round; an