With that unwavering gaze still upon his dark blue eyes, she drew off her glove and held out her fair hand, smiling the while, as Circe doubtless did before her.

“I am sincerely glad to meet General Laurance, of whom I heard the American minister at Paris speak in glowing terms of commendation.  I believe I Also met a son of General Laurance in Paris?  Certainly he resembles you most strikingly.”

As he received into his own the pretty pearly hand, and bowed low over it, he felt agreeably surprised by the cordiality of a reception which appeared utterly inconsistent with her stern contemptuous rejection of his previous attempts to form her acquaintance; and he could not quite reconcile the beaming smile on her lip, and the sparkling radiance in her eyes, with the pallor which he saw settle swiftly upon her face when his name was first pronounced.

“Ah!  My son Cuthbert?  Handsome young dog, and like his father, finds beauty the most powerful magnet.  Where did you meet him?”

“Once only, when he was introduced by our minister, who deputized him to deliver to me some custom-house regulations.

“Did you meet Mrs. Laurance?”

“Your wife, sir?”

Annoyance instantaneously clouded his countenance, and Dr. Plymley gnawed his lower lip to hide a smile.

“My son’s wife.  Cuthbert and I are the only survivors of my own immediate family.”

“If Madame had not so rigidly adhered to her recluse habits, she could scarcely have failed to learn from his brilliant campaigns in gay society that the General is unfettered by matrimonial bonds, and almost as irresistible and popular as his naughty model D’Orsay.”

“Madame, Plymley is a traitor, jealously stabbing my spotless reputation.  I deny the indictment, and appeal to your heavenly charity, praying you to believe that I plead guilty only to the possession of a heart tenderly vulnerable to the shafts of grace and beauty.”

The earnestness of his tone and manner was unmistakable, and beneath the bold admiration of his fine eyes, the carmine came swiftly back to her blanched cheek.

“Beau monde and its fashionable foibles constitute a sealed volume to me.  My world is apart from that in which General Laurance wins myrtle crowns, and wears them so royally.”

“When genius like Madame’s monopolizes the bay, we less gifted mortals must even twine myrtle leaves, or else humbly bow, bare of chaplets.  But may I ask why you so sternly taboo that social world which you are so pre-eminently fitted to grace and adorn?  When your worshippers are wellnigh frenzied with delight, watching you beyond the footlights, you cruelly withdraw behind the impenetrable curtain of seclusion; and only at rare intervals allow us tantalizing glimpses of you, seated in mocking inaccessibility between those two most abominable ancient griffons, whose claws and beaks are ever ferociously prominent.  When some desperate deluded adorer rashly hires a band of Neapolitan experts to stab, and bury that grim pair of jailers in the broad deep grave out there, toward Procida, the crime of murder will be upon Madame’s fair head.”