"Can all this," he asked himself, "be only preparatory to her breaking off her engagement altogether?" Such was the mood of mind in which Lord Albert entered Lady Tilney's drawing-rooms, and as hardly any of the invited were as yet come from the Opera, he had leisure unmolested to walk through them. They were brilliantly lighted, and filled with all the rifled sweets of the green-house; sweets, which seem but ill suited in their fresh purity for the scene they were brought to adorn. While the apartments were still empty, he had an opportunity of examining some of the works of art with which they were decorated. He stopped opposite to a Claude, which was certainly a contrast to the feelings of his own mind. The glowing sunrise, the dancing wave, the palace of the Medici, the business of a sea-port, conveyed him in idea to the Pitti Palace. "Often as that subject has been repeated," he said, turning to Mr. Francis Ombre, "by the same pencil, it is always new, always redolent of repose and pleasure; the scintillating sunbeams are still emblematic of that dancing of the heart, which in the morning of our days gilds every thing with beauty: no, there is no after-pleasure which can equal the sunrise of existence; and if ever picture conveyed a moral truth, the pictures of Claude most assuredly have this power." "Yes," replied Mr. Ombre, "I love to sun myself at a Claude, it is the only sun one does see in this climate." Lord Albert passed on, sighing as he went, and his attention was again arrested by an antique bust of Psyche: "What refinement of tenderness in the eyelid; what soul in the curvature of the lip! how the line swells, and then is lost again in the almost dimpling roundness of the chin! how child-like, and yet how replete with meaning, the turn of the head and neck! it is at once the bud, the flower, the fruit of beauty amalgamated and embodied in the marble." It was indeed an emblem of soul. And of whom did it remind Lord Albert? Of his own Adeline. His own! there was an electric touch in the thought--was she _indeed still his own_, or had he lost her for ever? Lady Hamlet Vernon had stood unperceived by him, watching him for some previous minutes, and by that sense which never fails to inform a woman in love, she felt certain from his manner of looking at the Psyche, that it conveyed more to interest him than any mere ideas of _virtù_ could possibly do.