Soon, now, as he left the chamber of Isabel, these mysteriousnesses remastered him completely; and as he mechanically sat down in the dining-room chair, gently offered him by Delly—for the silent girl saw that some strangeness that sought stillness was in him;—Pierre's mind was revolving how it was possible, or any way conceivable, that Lucy should have been inspired with such seemingly wonderful presentiments of something assumed, or disguising, or non-substantial, somewhere and somehow, in his present most singular apparent position in the eye of the world. The wild words of Isabel yet rang in his ears. It were an outrage upon all womanhood to imagine that Lucy, however yet devoted to him in her hidden heart, should be willing to come to him, so long as she supposed, with the rest of the world, that Pierre was an ordinarily married man. But how—what possible reason—what possible intimation could she have had to suspect the contrary, or to suspect anything unsound? For neither at this present time, nor at any subsequent period, did Pierre, or could Pierre, possibly imagine that in her marvellous presentiments of Love she had any definite conceit of the precise nature of the secret which so unrevealingly and enchantedly wrapped him. But a peculiar thought passingly recurred to him here.
Within his social recollections there was a very remarkable case of a youth, who, while all but affianced to a beautiful girl—one returning his own throbbings with incipient passion—became somehow casually and momentarily betrayed into an imprudent manifested tenderness toward a second lady; or else, that second lady's deeply concerned friends caused it to be made known to the poor youth, that such committal tenderness toward her he had displayed, nor had it failed to exert its natural effect upon her; certain it is, this second lady drooped
