and the placid Looker-on were engaged at a contest of ecarte, with the
lively Venosta, for the gallery, interposing criticisms and admonitions,
Isaura was listlessly turning over a collection of photographs, strewed
on a table that stood near to an open window in the remoter angle of the
room, communicating with a long and wide balcony filled partially with
flowers and overlooking the Champs Elysees, softly lit up by the
innumerable summer stars. Suddenly a whisper, the command of which she
could not resist, thrilled through her ear, and sent the blood rushing
back to her heart.

"Do you remember that evening at Enghien? how I said that our
imagination could not carry us beyond the question whether we two should
be gazing together that night twelve months on that star which each of us
had singled out from the hosts of heaven? That was the 8th of July. It
is the 8th of July once more. Come and seek for our chosen star--come.
I have something to say, which say I must. Come."

Mechanically, as it were,--mechanically, as they tell us the Somnambulist
obeys the Mesmeriser,--Isaura obeyed that summons. In a kind of dreamy
submission she followed his steps, and found herself on the balcony,
flowers around her and stars above, by the side of the man who had been
to her that being ever surrounded by flowers and lighted by stars,--the
ideal of Romance to the heart of virgin Woman.

"Isaura," said the Englishman, softly. At the sound of her own name for
the first time heard from those lips, every nerve in her frame quivered.
"Isaura, I have tried to live without you. I cannot. You are all in all
to me: without you it seems to me as if earth had no flowers, and even
heaven had withdrawn its stars. Are there differences between us,
differences of taste, of sentiments, of habits, of thought? Only let me