very strongly now. In spite of herself, she watched M. de Nueil's
expressive face, and admired the noble countenance of a soul, unbroken
as yet by the cruel discipline of the life of the world, unfretted by
continual scheming to gratify personal ambition and vanity. Gaston was
in the flower of his youth, he impressed her as a man with something
in him, unaware as yet of the great career that lay before him. So
both these two made reflections most dangerous for their peace of
mind, and both strove to conceal their thoughts. M. de Nueil saw in
the Vicomtesse a rare type of woman, always the victim of her
perfections and tenderness; her graceful beauty is the least of her
charms for those who are privileged to know the infinite of feeling
and thought and goodness in the soul within; a woman whose instinctive
feeling for beauty runs through all the most varied expressions of
love, purifying its transports, turning them to something almost holy;
wonderful secret of womanhood, the exquisite gift that Nature so
seldom bestows. And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the ring
of sincerity in Gaston's voice, while he told of his youthful
troubles, began to understand all that grown children of
five-and-twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept them
alike from corrupting influences and intercourse with men and women of
the world whose sophistical reasoning and experience destroys the fair
qualities of youth. Here was the ideal of a woman's dreams, a man
unspoiled as yet by the egoism of family or success, or by that narrow
selfishness which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion,
self-sacrifice, and high demands of self; all the flowers so soon
wither that enrich at first the life of delicate but strong emotions,
and keep alive the loyalty of the heart.

But these two, once launched forth into the vast of sentiment, went
far indeed in theory, sounding the depths in either soul, testing the