She had been pleased with him on the
first evening; his bright handsome face, his courteous reverence for her
sex--expressed in every word, every tone, every look--his sympathy with
all good thoughts, his freshness and candour, were calculated to charm
the coldest and most difficult of judges. Diana liked, and even admired
him, but it was from an abstract point of view. He seemed a creature as
remote from her own life as a portrait of Henry of Navarre, seen and
admired in some royal picture-gallery to-day, to fade out of her memory
to-morrow.
There was only one point in connection with Gustave Lenoble which
occupied her serious thoughts; and this was the nature of his relations
with her father.
This was a subject that sorely troubled her. Hope as she might for the
future, she could not shut her eyes to the past. She knew that her
father had lived for years as a cheat and a trickster--now by one
species of falsehood and trickery, now by another--rarely incautious,
but always unscrupulous. How had this village seigneur of Normandy
fallen into the Captain's toils; and what was the nature of the net that
was spread for him?
The talk of business, the frequent interviews, the evident elation of her
father's spirits, combined to assure her that some great scheme was in
progress, some commercial enterprise, perhaps not entirely dishonest--nay
even honest, when regarded from the sanguine speculator's point of view,
but involving the hazard of Gustave Lenoble's fortune.
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