My mother considered Leoni fascinating. It is true that his face is wonderfully beautiful, and that he has the secret of being graceful, animated and perfectly at ease with his dandified clothes and manners. But I felt none of those romantic emotions which give to ardent hearts a foretaste of their destiny. I glanced at him for a moment in obedience to my mother, and should not have looked at him a second time, had she not forced me to do so by her constant exclamations and by her manifest curiosity to know his name. A young man of our acquaintance, whom she summoned in order to question him, informed her that he was a noble Venetian, a friend of one of the leading merchants of the city, that he seemed to have an enormous fortune, and that his name was Leone Leoni. My mother was delighted with this information. The merchant who was Leoni's friend was to give a party the very next day, to which we were invited. Frivolous and credulous as she was, it was enough for her to have learned vaguely that Leoni was rich and noble, to induce her to cast her eyes upon him instantly. She spoke to me about him the same evening, and urged me to be pretty the next day. I smiled and went to sleep at precisely the same hour as on other nights, without the slightest acceleration of my heart beats at the thought of Leoni. I had become accustomed to listen without emotion to the formation of such projects. My mother declared that I was so sensible that they were not called upon to treat me like a child. The poor woman did not realize that she herself was much more of a child than I. She dressed me with so much care and magnificence that I was proclaimed queen of the ball; but at first the time seemed to have been wasted: Leoni did not appear, and my mother thought that he had already left Brussels. Incapable of controlling her impatience, she asked the master of the house what had become of his Venetian. "Ah!" said Monsieur Delpech, "you have noticed my Venetian already, have you?"--He glanced with a smile at my costume, and understood.--"He's an attractive youngster," he said, "of noble birth, and very much in fashion both in Paris and London; but it is my duty to inform you that he is a terrible gambler, and that the reason that you don't see him here is that he prefers the cards to the loveliest women." "A gambler!" said my mother; "that's very bad." "Oh! that depends," rejoined Monsieur Delpech. "When one has the means, you know!" "To be sure!" said my mother; and that remark satisfied her. She worried no more about Leoni's passion for gambling.