Florian loved him very much, and indeed the affection between the two brothers endured until the end of their intercourse. Florian was always consciously the elder and wiser, and felt himself the stronger long after Raoul had become taller than Florian. Even after Raoul was well on in his thirties, and both the boys had boys of their own, Florian still thought of the Chevalier de Puysange as a little brother with a dirty face and a smell of clean earth, whom you loved and patronized, and from whom you had one secret only. For of course you never told Raoul about Melior. You spoke to nobody about Melior. You found it wiser and more delicious to retain all knowledge of her loveliness for entirely private consideration, and thus not be bothered with people’s illogical notion that Melior was only a dream. For the memory of the Princess Melior’s loveliness did not depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage could put quite out of mind the beauty that he had in childhood, however briefly, seen. Other women came and in due season went. His wives indeed seemed to die with a sort of uniform prematureness in which the considerate found something of fatality: nor did the social conventions of the day permit a Puysange to shirk amusing himself with yet other women. Florian amused himself so liberally, once his father was dead, and the former Prince de Lisuarte had succeeded to the major title and to his part of the estates, that they of Bellegarde were grieved when it was known that the fourth Duke of Puysange now planned to marry for the fifth time. At Florian’s château of Bellegarde, affairs had sped very pleasantly since the death of his last wife, and the packing off of his son to Storisende. Storisende, by the old Duke’s will, had fallen to Raoul. Affairs had sped so pleasantly, they said at Bellegarde, that it seemed a deplorable risk for monseigneur to be marrying a woman who might, conceivably, be forthwith trying to reclaim him from all fashionable customs. Besides, he was upon this occasion marrying a daughter of the house of Nérac, just as his brother the Chevalier had done. And this was a ruiningly virtuous family, a positively dowdy family who hardly seemed to comprehend—they said at Bellegarde,—that we were now living in the modern world of 1723, and that fashions had altered since the old King’s death. “For how long, little monster, will this new toy amuse you?” asked Mademoiselle Cécile. It appears unfair here to record that at nine o’clock in the morning they were not yet up and about the day’s duties, without recording also, in palliation of such seeming laziness, that there was no especial need to hurry, for all of mademoiselle’s trunks had been packed overnight, and she was not to leave Bellegarde until noon.