before been so sweet, been associated with so much that was brilliant and suggestive and entertaining.  The lights, the flowers, the music, the crowd, the splendid women, the jewels, the strangeness even of the universal murmur of a clever foreign tongue were all a vivid symbol and assurance of his having grasped his purpose and forced along his groove.  If Newman’s smile was larger than usual, it was not tickled vanity that pulled the strings; he had no wish to be shown with the finger or to achieve a personal success.  If he could have looked down at the scene, invisible, from a hole in the roof, he would have enjoyed it quite as much.  It would have spoken to him about his own prosperity and deepened that easy feeling about life to which, sooner or later, he made all experience contribute.  Just now the cup seemed full.

“It is a very pretty party,” said Mrs. Tristram, after they had walked a while.  “I have seen nothing objectionable except my husband leaning against the wall and talking to an individual whom I suppose he takes for a duke, but whom I more than suspect to be the functionary who attends to the lamps.  Do you think you could separate them?  Knock over a lamp!”

I doubt whether Newman, who saw no harm in Tristram’s conversing with an ingenious mechanic, would have complied with this request; but at this moment Valentin de Bellegarde drew near.  Newman, some weeks previously, had presented Madame de Cintre’s youngest brother to Mrs. Tristram, for whose merits Valentin professed a discriminating relish and to whom he had paid several visits.

“Did you ever read Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci?” asked Mrs. Tristram.  “You remind me of the hero of the ballad:—­

     ’Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
     Alone and palely loitering?’”

“If I am alone, it is because I have been deprived of your society,” said Valentin.  “Besides it is good manners for no man except Newman to look happy.  This is all to his address.  It is not for you and me to go before the curtain.”

“You promised me last spring,” said Newman to Mrs. Tristram, “that six months from that time I should get into a monstrous rage.  It seems to me the time’s up, and yet the nearest I can come to doing anything rough now is to offer you a cafe glace.”

“I told you we should do things grandly,” said Valentin.  “I don’t allude to the cafes glaces.  But every one is here, and my sister told me just now that Urbain had been adorable.”

“He’s a good fellow, he’s a good fellow,” said Newman.  “I love him as a brother.  That reminds me that I ought to go and say something polite to your mother.”

“Let it be something very polite indeed,” said Valentin.  “It may be the last time you will feel so much like it!”