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"Your friend, Signorina!" cried Graham, incredulously; "is Madame de Grantmesnil your friend?" "The dearest I have in the world." Graham's face darkened; he turned away in silence, and in another minute vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. "Her dearest friend Madame de Grantmesnil!" he muttered.
She died some days since in a convent to which she had retired." Isaura had no cause to mourn the dead, but she felt a shock in the suddenness of this information; and in that sweet spirit of womanly compassion which entered so largely into her character, and made a part of her genius itself, she murmured tearfully, "The poor Signora! Why could I not have been with her in illness?
"Oh, Madame! and oh, my poor Isaura!" cried Madame Rameau, bursting into tears. "So we have been all this time a burden on you, aided to bring such want on yon! How can we ever be forgiven? And my son to leave us thus, not even to tell us where to find him!"
Isaura took back the letter, and leaned her cheek on her hand, looking dreamily into space. It was some moments before she replied, and her words then had no reference to Mrs. Morley's consolatory exhortation. "He was so pleased when he learned that I renounced the career on which I had set my ambition.
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 You are all in all to me: without you it seems to me as if earth had no flowers, and even heaven had withdrawn its stars.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?
Here he took forth and placed a letter in Isaura's hand; and, as if to allow her to read it unobserved, retired to the window recess. Isaura glanced over the letter. It ran thus: "I feel that it was only to your compassion that I owed your consent to my suit. Could I have doubted that before, your words when we last met sufficed to convince me.
To this society, at the request of Alain de Rochebriant and of Enguerrand, Isaura had eagerly attached herself. It occupied much of her time; and in connection with it she was brought much into sympathetic acquaintance with Raoul de Vandemar the most zealous and active member of that Society of St. Francois de Sales, to which belonged other young nobles of the Legitimist creed.
"I have been misinformed, then; that lady is your mother." Isaura laughed a pretty, low, silvery laugh, and replied in English, "She is not my mother; but I call her Madre, for I know no name more loving." Graham was touched, and said gently, "Your own mother was evidently very dear to you."
"Never fear; the Signorina, who adores Tasso, will take him under her special protection," said Savarin, interrupting Rameau's sullen and embarrassed reply. Graham's brow slightly contracted. "Mademoiselle," he said, "is then to be united in the conduct of this journal with M. Gustave Rameau?" "No, indeed!" exclaimed Isaura, somewhat frightened at the idea.
Still more, how constitute himself her guardian, so as to secure it to herself, independently of her husband? Perhaps Isaura was too infatuated with Rameau, or too romantically unselfish, to permit the fortune so mysteriously conveyed being exclusively appropriated to herself.
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