Heeding not the stir of the world without, Graham was compelling into one resolve the doubts and scruples which had so long warred against the heart which they ravaged, but could not wholly subdue. The conversations with Mrs. Morley and Rochebriant had placed in a light in which he had not before regarded it, the image of Isaura. He had reasoned from the starting-point of his love for her, and had sought to convince himself that against that love it was his duty to strive. But now a new question was addressed to his conscience as well as to his heart. What though he had never formally declared to her his affection-- never, in open words, wooed her as his own--never even hinted to her the hopes of a union which at one time he had fondly entertained,--still was it true that his love had been too transparent not to be detected by her, and not to have led her on to return it? Certainly he had, as we know, divined that he was not indifferent to her: at Enghien, a year ago, that he had gained her esteem, and perhaps interested her fancy. We know also how he had tried to persuade himself that the artistic temperament, especially when developed in women, is too elastic to suffer the things of real life to have lasting influence over happiness or sorrow,--that in the pursuits in which her thought and imagination found employ, in the excitement they sustained, and the fame to which they conduced, Isaura would be readily consoled for a momentary pang of disappointed affection. And that a man so alien as himself, both by nature and by habit, from the artistic world, was the very last person who could maintain deep and permanent impression on her actual life or her ideal dreams. But what if, as he gathered from the words of the fair American--what if, in all these assumptions, she was wholly mistaken? What if, in previously revealing his own heart, he had decoyed hers--what if, by a desertion she had no right to anticipate, he had blighted her future? What if this brilliant child of genius could love as warmly, as deeply, as enduringly as any simple village girl to whom there is no poetry except love? If this were so--what became the first claim on his honour, his conscience, his duty? The force which but a few days ago his reasonings had given to the arguments that forbade him to think of Isaura, became weaker and weaker, as now in an altered mood of reflection he resummoned and reweighed them.