The scene between the Duchess and the Spaniard, Gubetta, was received with the utmost applause, and the pathos of that between the son and his unknown mother, which succeeded, touched the audience to tears; but when the maskers rushed in and her vizard was torn off, and her true name proclaimed, and, amid her heart-rending wailings, the curtain fell on the first act, the shouts were perfectly thunderous with enthusiasm. The role of Gennaro was performed by the brother of the cantatrice, Leon d'Armilly, a young man of twenty, of delicate and graceful figure, and as decidedly blonde as his sister was brunette. Nature seemed to have made a great mistake in sex when this brother and sister were fashioned. Indeed, it seemed hardly possible that they could be brother and sister, a remark constantly made by the audience, and the kindred announced on the bills was generally viewed as one of those convenient relationships often assumed on the stage, but having no more reality than those of the dramatis personae themselves. "A second Pasta!" cried Chateau-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately on the descent of the curtain. "Heard you ever such a magnificent contralto?" "Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?" asked Beauchamp. "Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities," thoughtfully remarked Debray, "I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fashion, and who, the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit the African generals." "Whom can you mean, Debray?" cried Beauchamp. "A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for justice the horrible discovery transpired." "Ha!" exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. "You cannot mean Eugenie Danglars, daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once to have wed?" "The very same," quietly rejoined the Secretary; "but this lady cannot be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons," he quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily remarked: "Ah! there are M. Dantes and M. Lamartine, as usual, together." "M. Dantes!" exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around. "Impossible!"