at Enghien, a year ago, that he had gained her esteem, and perhaps
interested her fancy.

We know also how he had tried to persuade himself that the artistic
temperament, especially when developed in women, is too elastic to suffer
the things of real life to have lasting influence over happiness or
sorrow,--that in the pursuits in which her thought and imagination found
employ, in the excitement they sustained, and the fame to which they
conduced, Isaura would be readily consoled for a momentary pang of
disappointed affection. And that a man so alien as himself, both by
nature and by habit, from the artistic world, was the very last person
who could maintain deep and permanent impression on her actual life or
her ideal dreams. But what if, as he gathered from the words of the fair
American--what if, in all these assumptions, she was wholly mistaken?
What if, in previously revealing his own heart, he had decoyed hers--what
if, by a desertion she had no right to anticipate, he had blighted her
future? What if this brilliant child of genius could love as warmly, as
deeply, as enduringly as any simple village girl to whom there is no
poetry except love? If this were so--what became the first claim on his
honour, his conscience, his duty?

The force which but a few days ago his reasonings had given to the
arguments that forbade him to think of Isaura, became weaker and weaker,
as now in an altered mood of reflection he resummoned and reweighed them.

All those prejudices--which had seemed to him such rational common-sense
truths, when translated from his own mind into the words of Lady Janet's
letter,--was not Mrs. Morley right in denouncing them as the crotchets of
an insolent egotism? Was it not rather to the favour than to the
disparagement of Isaura, regarded even in the man's narrow-minded view of