cosmopolitan as well as patriotic, accustomed to consider what effect
every vibration in that balance of European power, which no deep thinker
can despise, must have on the destinies of civilised humanity, and on
those of the nation to which he belongs. But are there not moments in
life when the human heart suddenly narrows the circumference to which its
emotions are extended? As the ebb of a tide, it retreats from the shores
it had covered on its flow, drawing on with contracted waves the
treasure-trove it has selected to hoard amid its deeps.




CHAPTER II.

On quitting the dining-room, the Duchesse de Tarascon said to her host,
on whose arm she was leaning, "Of course you and I must go with the
stream. But is not all the fine talk that has passed to-day at your
table, and in which we too have joined, a sort of hypocrisy? I may say
this to you; I would say it to no other."

"And I say to you, Madame la Duchesse, that which I would say to no
other. Thinking over it as I sit alone, I find myself making a 'terrible
hazard;' but when I go abroad and become infected by the general
enthusiasm, I pluck up gaiety of spirit, and whisper to myself, 'True,
but it may be an enormous gain.' To get the left bank of the Rhine is a
trifle; but to check in our next neighbour a growth which a few years
hence would overtop us,--that is no trifle. And, be the gain worth the
hazard or not, could the Emperor, could any Government likely to hold its
own for a week, have declined to take the chance of the die?"