Of whom were they talking, and what were they going to do at midnight tomorrow?
He did not leave his cousin's side again.

The latter had gone and seated himself.

He was especially interested by the Countess Sabine.

Her name had often been mentioned in his presence, and he knew that, having been married at the age of seventeen, she must now be thirty-four and that since her marriage she had passed a cloistered existence with her husband and her mother-in-law.

In society some spoke of her as a woman of religious chastity, while others pitied her and recalled to memory her charming bursts of laughter and the burning glances of her great eyes in the days prior to her imprisonment in this old town house.