Whilst Mrs. Petito was saying this, the entrance and retreat had been made, and made with such dignity, grace, and modesty: with such innocence, dove-like eyes had been raised upon him, fixed and withdrawn; with such a gracious bend the Lady Isabel had bowed to him as she retired; with such a smile, and with so soft a voice, had repeated “Lord Colambre!” that his lordship, though well aware that all this was mere acting, could not help saying to himself, as he left the house, “It is a pity it is only acting. There is certainly something very engaging in this woman. It is a pity she is an actress. And so young! A much younger woman than I expected. A widow before most women are wives. So young, surely she cannot be such a fiend as they described her to be!” A few nights afterwards Lord Colambre was with some of his acquaintance at the theatre, when Lady Isabel and her mother came into the box, where seats had been reserved for them, and where their appearance instantly made that _sensation_, which is usually created by the entrance of persons of the first notoriety in the fashionable world. Lord Colambre was not a man to be dazzled by fashion, or to mistake notoriety for deference paid to merit, and for the admiration commanded by beauty or talents. Lady Dashfort’s coarse person, loud voice, daring manners, and indelicate wit, disgusted him almost past endurance. He saw Sir James Brooke in the box opposite to him; and twice determined to go round to him. His lordship had crossed the benches, and once his hand was upon the lock of the door; but, attracted as much by the daughter as repelled by the mother, he could move no farther. The mother’s masculine boldness heightened, by contrast, the charms of the daughter’s soft sentimentality. The Lady Isabel seemed to shrink from the indelicacy of her mother’s manners, and appeared peculiarly distressed by the strange efforts Lady Dashfort made, from time to time, to drag her forward, and to fix upon her the attention of gentlemen. Colonel Heathcock, who, as Mrs. Petito had informed Lord Colambre, had come over with his regiment to Ireland, was beckoned into their box by Lady Dashfort, by her squeezed into a seat next to Lady Isabel; but Lady Isabel seemed to feel sovereign contempt, properly repressed by politeness, for what, in a low whisper to a female friend on the other side of her, she called, “the self-sufficient inanity of this sad coxcomb.” Other coxcombs, of a more vivacious style, who stationed themselves round her mother, or to whom her mother stretched from box to box to talk, seemed to engage no more of Lady Isabel’s attention than just what she was compelled to give by Lady Dashfort’s repeated calls of, “Isabel! Isabel! Colonel G----, Isabel! Lord D---- bowing to you. Bell! Bell! Sir Harry B----. Isabel, child, with your eyes on the stage? Did you never see a play before? Novice! Major P---- waiting to catch your eye this quarter of