"No, no, my love; you must stop to see my friend. And now tell me a little about the Sheldons. Has anything been stirring since I saw them last?" "Nothing whatever, papa. Charlotte is very happy; she always had a happy disposition, but she is gayer than ever since her engagement with--Valentine." "What an absurd infatuation!" muttered the Captain. "And he--Valentine--is very good, and works very hard at his literary profession--and loves her very dearly." It cost her an effort to say this even now, even now when she fancied herself cured of that folly which had once been so sweet to her. To speak of him like this--to put him away out of her own life, and contemplate him as an element in the life of another--could not be done without some touch of the old anguish. There was a loud double-knock at the street-door as she said this, and a step sounded presently in the passage; a quick, firm tread. There was nothing stealthy about that, at any rate. "My friend Lenoble," said the Captain; and in the next instant a gentleman entered the room, a gentleman who was in every quality the opposite of the person whom Diana had expected to see. These speculative pictures are seldom good portraits. Miss Paget had expected to find her father's ally small and shrivelled, old and ugly, dried-up and withered in the fiery atmosphere of fraud and conspiracy; in outward semblance a monkey, in soul a tiger. And instead of this obnoxious creature there burst into the room a man of four-and-thirty years of age, tall, stalwart, with a fair frank face, somewhat browned by summer suns; thick auburn hair and beard, close trimmed and cropped in the approved Gallic fashion--clear earnest blue eyes, and a mouth whose candour and sweetness a moustache could not hide. Henry of Navarre, before the white lilies of France had dazzled his eyes with their fatal splendour, before the court of the Medici had taught the Bearnois to dissemble, before the sometime Protestant champion had put on that apparel of stainless white in which he went forth to stain his soul with the sin of a diplomatic apostasy. Such a surprise as this makes a kind of crisis in the eventless record of a woman's life. Diana found herself blushing as the stranger stood near the door awaiting her father's introduction. She was ashamed to think of the wrong her imagination had done him.