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186 186 THE PORTKAIT OF A LADY. superficially seemed vacant. Like many of his fellow colonists, Mr. Luce was a high or rather a deep conservative, and gave no countenance to the government recently established in France. He had no faith in its duration, and would assure you from year to year that its end was close at hand. " They want to be kept down, sir, to be kept down ; nothing but the strong hand the iron heel will do for them," he would frequently say of the French people ; and .his ideal of a fine government was that of the lately-abolished Empire. " Paris is much less attractive than in the days of the Emperor ; he knew how to make a city pleasant," Mr. Luce had often remarked to Mrs. Touchett, who was quite of his own way of thinking, and wished to know what one had crossed that odious Atlantic for but to get away from republics. " Why, madam, sitting in the Champs Ely sees, opposite to the Palace of Industry, I have seen the court -carriages from the Tuileries pass up and down as many as seven times a day. I remember one occasion when they went as high as nine times. What do you see now f l It's- no use talking, the style's all gone. Napoleon knew what the French people want, and there'll be a cloud over Paris till they get the Empire back again." Among Mrs. Luce's visitors on Sunday afternoons was a young man with whom Isabel had had a good deal of convers- ation, and whom she found full of valuable knowledge. Mr. Edward Rosier Ned Hosier, as he was called was a native of New York, and had been brought up in Paris, living there under the eye of his father, who, as it happened, had been an old and intimate friend of the late Mr. Archer. Edward Rosier remembered Isabel as a little girl ; it had been his father who came to the rescue of the little Archers at the inn at Neufchatel (he was travelling that way with the boy, and stopped at the hotel by chance), after their bonne had gone off with the Russian prince and when Mr. Archer's whereabouts remained for some days a mystery. Isabel remembered perfectly the neat little male child, whose hair smelt of a delicious cosmetic, and who had a bonne of his own, warranted to lose sight of him under no provocation. Isabel took a walk with the pair beside the lake, and thought little Edward as pretty as an angel a comparison by no means conventional in her mind, for she had a very definite conception of a type of features which she supposed to be angelic, and which her new friend perfectly illustrated. A small pink face, surmounted by a blue velvet bonnet and set off by a stiff embroidered collar, became the countenance of her childish dreams ; and she firmly believed for some time after-