member of his family could afford to take a snubbing.

The young man's tact, his deference, his urbane insistence, won a
concession from Mrs. Cleve. The engagement was to be put off and her
daughter was to return home, be brought out and receive the homage she
was entitled to and which might well take a form representing peril to
the suit of this first headlong aspirant. They were to exchange neither
letters nor mementoes nor messages; but if at the end of two years
Euphemia had refused offers enough to attest the permanence of her
attachment he should receive an invitation to address her again. This
decision was promulgated in the presence of the parties interested. The
Count bore himself gallantly, looking at his young friend as if he
expected some tender protestation. But she only looked at him silently
in return, neither weeping nor smiling nor putting out her hand. On this
they separated, and as M. de Mauves walked away he declared to himself
that in spite of the confounded two years he was one of the luckiest of
men--to have a fiancee who to several millions of francs added such
strangely beautiful eyes.

How many offers Euphemia refused but scantily concerns us--and how the
young man wore his two years away. He found he required pastimes, and as
pastimes were expensive he added heavily to the list of debts to be
cancelled by Euphemia's fortune. Sometimes, in the thick of what he had
once called pleasure with a keener conviction than now, he put to
himself the case of their failing him after all; and then he remembered
that last mute assurance of her pale face and drew a long breath of such
confidence as he felt in nothing else in the world save his own
punctuality in an affair of honour.

At last, one morning, he took the express to Havre with a letter of Mrs.