rquise too was just one of themselves; she was a part of their
charming home.

'She _is_ such a love!' said Mrs. Temperly to the foreign gentleman,
with an irrepressible movement of benevolence.

To which Raymond heard the gentleman reply that, Ah, she was the most
distinguished woman in France.

'Do you know Madame de Brives?' Effie asked of Raymond, while they were
waiting for her to come in.

She came in at that moment, and the girl turned away quickly without an
answer.

'How in the world should I know her?' That was the answer he would have
been tempted to give. He felt very much out of Cousin Maria's circle.
The foreign gentleman fingered his moustache and looked at him sidewise.
The Marquise was a very pretty woman, fair and slender, of middle age,
with a smile, a complexion, a diamond necklace, of great splendour, and
a charming manner. Her greeting to her friends was sweet and familiar,
and was accompanied with much kissing, of a sisterly, motherly,
daughterly kind; and yet with this expression of simple, almost homely
sentiment there was something in her that astonished and dazzled. She
might very well have been, as the foreign young man said, the most
distinguished woman in France. Dora had not rushed forward to meet her
with nearly so much _empressement_ as Effie, and this gave him a chance
to ask the former who she was. The girl replied that she was her
mother's most intimate friend: to which he rejoined that that was not a
description; what he wanted to know was her title to this exalted
position.

'Why, can't you see it? She is beautiful and she is good.'

'I see that she is beautiful; but how can I see that she is good?'

'Good to mamma, I mean, and to Effie and Tishy.'

'And isn't she good to you?'

'Oh, I don't know her so well. But I delight to look at her.'

'Certainly, that must be a great pleasure,' said Raymond. He enjoyed it
during dinner, which was now served, though his enjoyment was diminished
by his not finding himself next to Dora. They sat at a small round table
and he had at his right his Cousin Maria, whom he had taken in. On his
left was Madame de Brives, who had the foreign gentleman for a
neighbour. Then came Effie and Mademoiselle Bourde, and Dora was on the
other side of her mother. Raymond regarded this as marked--a symbol of
the fact that Cousin Maria would continue to separate them. He remained
in ignorance of the other gentleman's identity, and remembered how he
had