Dolores felt an agreeable sense of being perfectly at ease in the presence of Mr. Durand, and rendered herself unusually charming. Percy sauntered by the ladies while they visited various departments, and they finally lunched together. Both he and Dolores were gifted with refined wit, and ready powers of repartee, and Mrs. Butler was an appreciative listener to their gay sallies and bright criticisms. "Positively I feel as if I had known both of you ladies all my life!" Percy said, as the day wore on. "It would require months, or years, in our own land to arrive at this pleasant feeling of comradeship. There is nothing like a rencontre in a foreign country, to break the ice of reserve." "Quite true," Mrs. Butler responded. "We enjoy each other's society better here, too, I think, because we all indulge the vein of Bohemianism which exists in us, and which we carefully hide from view at home. For instance: I met a party of staid and respectable men and matrons from Boston the other day. They had just paid a visit to the Mabille. 'A very wicked place,' they said; 'yet everybody seems to go, so we went.' These same people would no sooner visit a concert garden in America than they would deliberately walk into Purgatory." "I could relate similar experiences," was Percy's laughing rejoinder. "When I first came abroad I was accompanied by a very devout young man. He had often taken me to task for my Club habits. 'A fashionable club is the ante-room to a gambler's hell,' he said; and so far as I knew, he lived up to the rigorous code of morals he preached to others. What was my amazement to find his curiosity fairly unsatiable in regard to the wicked side of Parisian life. "Beautiful parks, fine operas, and grand cathedrals and works of art, were all neglected by him, until he had explored, to his satisfaction, all the gaming-houses and variety theatres in the city of Paris. It was very amusing." When Percy made his adieux to the ladies it was with the understanding that he should dine with them at their temporary home, on the Avenue Josephine, the following afternoon, and escort them to the theatre in the evening. "Never before, Dolores," said Mrs. Butler, after Percy had taken his departure, "did I see you so charming as you have been to-day. Mr. Durand will be a phenomenal sort of man if he remains impervious to your charms, my dear. But then I have heard that some affair in his early life quite wrecked his heart. And so, I suppose, he has nothing but friendship to give any woman, now." If Mrs. Butler's secret wish was to rouse the woman's desire (latent in almost every feminine heart), to strive for that which is supposed to be unattainable, it signally failed. Her remark simply gave Dolores an added sense of freedom and rest in Mr. Durand's society. "Love is like measles," she reasoned--"not liable to occur the second time." Meanwhile Percy was saying to himself: