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there’ll be a dark cloud over Paris, our 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 con-
versation and whom she found full of valuable knowledge.
Mr. Edward Rosier—Ned Rosier as he was called—was na-
tive to New York and had been brought up in Paris, living
there under the eye of his father who, as it happened, had
been an early 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 small Archers at the
inn at Neufchatel (he was travelling that way with the boy
and had 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 re-
membered perfectly the neat little male child whose hair
smelt of a delicious cosmetic and who had a bonne all 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 defi-
nite 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 had become the counte-
nance of her childish dreams; and she had firmly believed
for some time afterwards that the heavenly hosts conversed
among themselves in a queer little dialect of French-Eng-
lish, expressing the properest sentiments, as when Edward

300 The Portrait of a Lady