My
sister asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was
near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a
ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that
would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.«
    »Well, here I am as large as life,« said Newman, extending his legs.
    »I don't know what you mean,« the young man went on, »by giving me unlimited
leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too
much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together - or
separately - that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with
almost impudent frankness, you interest me!« All this was uttered by M. de
Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and, in spite
of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he
sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical
urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de
Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a
Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a »How-d'ye-do,
Mosseer?« But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort
of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was
below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde,
Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the
agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford
a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and
if you greeted him with a »How well you are looking!« he started and turned
pale. In your well he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a round head, high
above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a
short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or
sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He
resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear bright
eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point