_L'amour passe--reste la cassette_."

Though there was enough of good in the son of Madame Rameau to revolt at
the precise words in which the counsel was given, still, as the fumes of
the punch yet more addled his brains, the counsel itself was acceptable;
and in that sort of maddened fury which intoxication produces in some
excitable temperaments, as Gustave reeled home that night leaning on the
arm of stouter Edgar Ferrier, he insisted on going out of his way to pass
the house in which Isaura lived, and, pausing under her window, gasped
out some verses of a wild song, then much in vogue among the votaries of
Felix Pyat, in which everything that existent society deems sacred was
reviled in the grossest ribaldry. Happily Isaura's ear heard it not.
The girl was kneeling by her bedside absorbed in prayer.




CHAPTER XII.

Three days after the evening thus spent by Gustave Rameau, Isaura was
startled by a visit from M. de Mauleon. She had not seen him since the
commencement of the siege, and she did not recognise him at first glance
in his military uniform.

"I trust you will pardon my intrusion, Mademoiselle," he said, in the low
sweet voice habitual to him in his gentler moods, "but I thought it
became me to announce to you the decease of one who, I fear, did not
discharge with much kindness the duties her connection with you imposed.
Your father's second wife, afterwards Madame Selby, is no more. She died
some days since in a convent to which she had retired."