practical effect of them, he was now as sincerely frightened at the
chance of the Communists becoming rampant as most of the Parisian
tradesmen were. Madame Rameau, on her side, though she had the dislike
to aristocrats which was prevalent with her class, was a stanch Roman
Catholic; and seeing in the disasters that had befallen her country the
punishment justly incurred by its sins, could not but be shocked by the
opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author of
certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were
proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in his
conversation. She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with
passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment
Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride
and depreciating his wisdom.

Partly to avoid meeting his parents, partly because he recoiled almost as
much from the ennui of meeting the other visitors at her apartments--the
Paris ladies associated with her in the ambulance, Raoul de Vandeniar,
whom he especially hated, and the Abbe Vertpre, who had recently come
into intimate friendship with both the Italian ladies--his visits to
Isaura had become exceedingly rare. He made his incessant military
duties the pretext for absenting himself; and now, on this evening, there
were gathered round Isaura's hearth--on which burned almost the last of
the hoarded fuel--the Venosta, the two Rameaus, the Abbe Vertpre, who was
attached as confessor to the society of which Isaura was so zealous a
member. The old priest and the young poetess had become dear friends.
There is in the nature of a woman (and especially of a woman at once so
gifted and so childlike as Isaura, combining an innate tendency towards
faith with a restless inquisitiveness of intellect, which is always
suggesting query or doubt) a craving for something afar from the sphere
of her sorrow, which can only be obtained through that "bridal of the