Eugenie, had for a considerable time occupied a first floor in King
Street, Holborn. Him I never saw in life, but Mademoiselle de Tourville
was one of the most accomplished, graceful, enchantingly-interesting
persons I have ever seen or known. There was a dangerous fascination in
the pensive tenderness through which her natural gaiety and archness of
manner would at intervals flash, like April sunlight glancing through
clouds and showers, which, the first time I saw her, painfully impressed
as much as it charmed me--perceiving, as I quickly did, that with her the
future peace, I could almost have said life, of Arthur Rushton was
irrevocably bound up. The fountains of his heart were for the first time
stirred to their inmost depths, and, situated as he and she were, what
but disappointment, bitterness, and anguish could well-up from those
troubled waters? Mademoiselle de Tourville, I could perceive, was fully
aware of the impression she had made upon the sensitive and amiable
Englishman; and I sometimes discovered an expression of pity--of
sorrowful tenderness, as it were--pass over her features as some
distincter revelation than usual of the nature of Arthur Rushton's
emotions flashed upon her. I also heard her express herself several
times, as overtly as she could, upon the _impossibility_ there existed
that she should, however much she might desire it, settle in England, or
even remain in it for any considerable length of time. All this I
understood, or thought I did, perfectly; but Rushton, bewildered,
entranced by feelings altogether new to him, saw nothing, heard nothing
but her presence, and felt, without reasoning upon it, that in that
delirious dream it was his fate either to live or else to bear no life.
Mrs. Rushton--and this greatly surprised me--absorbed in her matrimonial
and furnishing schemes and projects, saw nothing of what was going on.
Probably the notion that her son should for an instant think of allying
himself with an obscure, portionless foreigner, was, to a mind like hers,
too absurd to be for a moment entertained; or--But stay; borne along by
a crowd of rushing thoughts, I have, I find, somewhat anticipated the
regular march of my narrative.

M. and Mademoiselle de Tourville, according to the after-testimony of
their landlord, Mr. Osborn, had, from the time of their arrival in
England, a very constant visitor at their lodgings in King Street. He was
a tall French gentleman, of perhaps thirty yea