his own day,
nothing of the world of ours. I and Enguerrand will call on you
to-morrow, to take you to my mother, and before doing so, to consult as
to affairs in general. On this last matter Enguerrand is an oracle. Here
we are at the Contessa's."

CHAPTER VI.

The Contessa di Rimini received her visitors in a boudoir furnished with
much apparent simplicity, but a simplicity by no means inexpensive.
The draperies were but of chintz, and the walls covered with the same
material,--a lively pattern, in which the prevalents were rose-colour
and white; but the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the china stored in the
cabinets or arranged on the shelves, the small knickknacks scattered on
the tables, were costly rarities of art.

The Contessa herself was a woman who had somewhat passed her thirtieth
year,--not strikingly handsome, but exquisitely pretty. "There is," said
a great French writer, "only one way in which a woman can be handsome,
but a hundred thousand ways in which she can be pretty;" and it would
be impossible to reckon up the number of ways in which Adeline di Rimini
carried off the prize in prettiness.

Yet it would be unjust to the personal attractions of the Contessa
to class them all under the word "prettiness." When regarded more
attentively, there was an expression in her countenance that might
almost be called divine, it spoke so unmistakably of a sweet nature and
an untroubled soul. An English poet once described her by repeating the
old lines,

"Her face is like the milky way I' the sky,
--A meeting of gentle lights without a name."

She was not alone; an elderly lady sat on an armchair by the fire,
engaged in knitting; and a man, also elderly, and whose dress proclaimed
him an ecclesiastic, sat at the opposite corner, with a large Angora cat
on his lap.

"I present to you, Madame," said Raoul, "my new-found cousin, the
seventeenth Marquis de Rochebriant, whom I am proud to consider on the
male side the head of our house, representing its eldest branch. Welcome
him for my sake,--in future he will be welcome for his own."

The Contessa replied very graciously to this introduction, and made room
for Alain on the divan from which she had risen.

The old lady looked up from her knitting; the ecclesiastic removed
the cat from his lap. Said the old lady, "I announce myself to M. le
Marquis. I knew his mother well enough to be invited to his christening;
otherwise I have no pretension