When I reached my lodgings, I found a “friend” from him, who arranged a speedy meeting. We fought that same evening, behind the Prater, and I received his ball in my shoulder--mine, pierced his hat. I was recalled before my wound permitted me to leave my bed. The day I left Vienna, Lady Blanche was married to Count Favancourt! Some fourteen years had elapsed since that event and the time in which I now lay sleeping on the sofa; and yet, after all that long interval--with all its scenes of varied interests, its stormy passions, its hopes, its failures, its successes--the image of Blanche was before my mind’s eye, as brightly, joyously fair, as on the evening I first beheld her. I had forgotten all, that time and worldly knowledge had taught me, that, of all her attractions, her beauty only was real--that the graceful elegance of her bearing was only manner--that her gentleness was manner--her winning softness and delicacy mere manner--that all the fair endowments that seemed the rich promise of a gifted mind, united to a nature so bounteously endowed, were mere manner. She was _spirituelle_, lively, animated, and brilliant--all, from nothing but manner. To this knowledge I did not come without many a severe lesson. The teaching has been perfect, however, and made me what I am! Alas! how is it that mere gilding can look so like solid gold--nay, be made to cover more graceful tracery, and forms more purely elegant, than the real metal? I have said that I slept; and, as I lay, dreams came over me--dreams of that long-past time, when the few shadows that fell over my path in life were rather spots where, like the traveller on a sunny road, one halts to breathe awhile, and taste in the cool shade the balmy influence of repose. I thought of Blanche, too, as first I had seen her, and when first she taught my heart to feel the ecstasy of loving, breathing into my nature high hopes and longings, and making of life itself an ideal of delight and happiness. And, as I dreamed, there stole over my senses a faint, thrilling memory of that young joy my heart had known, and a feeling like that of health and ardent buoyancy, which for years long I had not experienced. _Her_ voice, tremulous with feeling, vibrating in all the passionate expression of an Italian song, was in my ears--I could hear the words--my very heart throbbed to their soft syllables as she sung the lines of Metastasio,-- “E tu, qui sa si te Ti sovrerai di me.”