ravels. His individuality, his
own impressions vanished before this passionate legacy bequeathed by one
human race to another. Marianne trembled, believing that she could see
even in Rosas's thoughts a desire to speak especially for her and to
her. Was it not thus that he spoke in his own house in the presence of
Lissac, squatting on his divan like an Arab story-teller?

She felt her youth renewed by the memory of all those past years. She
thought herself back once more in the studio on Rue de Laval. Sabine
Marsy's salon disappeared, Rosas was whispering in her ear, looking at
her, and allowing the love that he felt to be perceived, in spite of
Guy.

Guy! who was Guy? Marianne troubled herself about no one but De Rosas.
Only the duke existed now. Had Guy been blended with her life but for a
single moment? She embraced Rosas with her burning glance.

She no longer saw Sulpice, but he never looked away from Mademoiselle
Kayser. He thought her a most charming woman. A magnetic fluid, as it
were, flowed from her to this man, and he, with wandering mind, did not
hear one word of Monsieur de Rosas's narrative, but concentrated his
thoughts upon that pretty, enticing woman, whom he could not refrain
from comparing with his wife, sitting so near her at this moment.

Adrienne was very pretty, her beauty was more regular than the other's.
Her smooth, blond hair was in contrast with the tumbled, auburn locks of
Marianne, and yet, extraordinary as it was--Adrienne had never seemed to
be so cold as on that evening, as she sat there motionless, watching,
while a timid habitual smile played over her lips.

Sulpice suffered somewhat in consequence of this awkwardness on
Adrienne's part, contrasted as it was with the clever freedom of manner,
graceful attitude, and flowing outlines of that disturbing neighbor,
with her dull white countenance, half-closed mouth, strange curl of her
lips, which seemed turned up as if in challenge. She was decidedly a
Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious
attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls. Some words
spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey's ears--a description of
the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians,
explained by the duke by way of parenthesis--suggested to Sulpice that
the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was,
after all, the filtering of a woman's glance through the very flesh of a
man, and