He had no reason to feel very cheerful.  He had quitted Vienna in order to betake himself to the Saxon Casino, where roulette and trente-et-quarante are played.  His ill-luck would have it that he stopped on the way at Milan, and fell in with a circle of ill repute, where this most imprudent of men played and lost.  There remained to him just enough cash to carry him to Saxon; but what can be accomplished in a casino when one has empty pockets?  Before crossing the Splugen he had written to a petty Jew banker of his acquaintance for money.  He counted but little on the compliance of this Hebrew, and this was why he paused five minutes to contemplate the Plessur, after which he retraced his steps.  Twenty minutes later he was crossing a public square, ornamented with a pretty Gothic fountain, and seeing before him a cathedral, he hastened to enter it.

The cathedral of Chur possesses, among other curiosities, a painting by Albert Durer, a St. Lawrence on the gridiron, attributed to Holbein, a piece of the true cross, and some relics of St. Lucius and his sister Ernesta.  Count Abel only accorded a wandering attention to either St. Lucius or St. Lawrence.  Scarcely had he made his way into the nave of the building, when he beheld something that appeared to him far more interesting than paintings or relics.  An English poet has said that at times there is revealed to us a glimpse of paradise in a woman’s face, and it was such a rare blessing that was at this moment vouchsafed unto Count Larinski.  He was not a romantic man, and yet he remained for some moments motionless, rooted to the spot in admiration.  Was it a premonition of his destiny?  The fact is that, in beholding for the first time Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz, for it was none other than she who thus riveted his attention, he experienced an inexplicable surprise, a thrilling of the heart, such as he never before had experienced.  In his first impression of this charming girl he made one slight mistake.  He divined at once that the man by whom she was accompanied, who had gray hair, a broad, open brow, vivacious eyes, shaded by beautiful, heavy eye-brows, belonged to some learned fraternity; but he imagined that this individual with a white cravat, who had evidently preserved his freshness of heart, although past sixty years of age, was the fortunate suitor of the beautiful girl by his side.

There are some women whom it is impossible not to gaze upon.  Wherever Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz appeared she was the object of universal observation:  first, because she was charming; and, then, because she had a way of her own of dressing and of arranging her hair, a peculiar movement of the head, a grace of carriage, which inevitably must attract notice.  There were those who made so bold as to assert that she assumed certain little peculiarities solely for the purpose of attracting the chance observer.  Do not believe a word of it.  She was altogether