classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion,

abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure
that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen

him since. Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob
Althor, the father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I

really don't know what you mean."
This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was

a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle
and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardlydesertion. The

daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their
wishes gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and

grooms, and otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in
possession of an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to

kiss her hand, and take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted
his flowers and all the little proofs of tenderness with which it is

proper to surround the lady of our choice; she even worked him a
purse, believing in such ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but

cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the Vilquins, and the Althors.
Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame

Mignon and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine
with the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot

of the lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the
eldest Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful,

and of high birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of
her engagement she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million.

Her poverty, well known to all, became a sentinel defending the
approaches to the Chalet fully as well as the prudence of the

Latournelles or the vigilance of Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a
time on Mademoiselle Mignon's position only to insult her.

"Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course."
"What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the

chance to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take
her!"

"After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--"
And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste's

imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and
the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing

that Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of
them as they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed

surprise that the mother and daughter were willing to live on among
the scenes of their former splendor. From her open window behind the

closed blinds Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--
"I am sure I can't think how they can live there," some one would say

as he paced the villa lawn,--perhaps to assist Vilquin in getting rid
of his tenant.

"What do you suppose they live on? they haven't any means of earning
money."

"I am told the old woman has gone blind."
"Is Mademoiselle Mignon still pretty? Dear me, how dashing she used to

be! Well, she hasn't any horses now."
Most young girls on hearing these spiteful and silly speeches, born of

an envy that now rushed, peevish and drivelling, to avenge the past,
would have felt the blood mount to their foreheads; others would have

wept; some would have undergone spasms of anger; but Modeste smiled,
as we smile at the theatre while watching the actors. Her pride could

not descend so low as the level of such speeches.
The other event was more serious than these mercenary meannesses.

Bettina Caroline died in the arms of her younger sister, who had
nursed her with the devotion of girlhood, and the curiosity of an

untainted imagination. In the silence of long nights the sisters
exchanged many a confidence. With what dramatic interest was poor

Bettina invested in the eyes of the innocent Modeste? Bettina knew
love through sorrow only, and she was dying of it. Among young girls

every man, scoundrel though he be, is still a lover. Passion is the
one thing absolutely real in the things of life, and it insists on its

supremacy. Charles d'Estourny, gambler, criminal, and debauchee,
remained in the memory of the sisters, the elegant Parisian of the

fetes of Havre, the admired of the womenkind. Bettina believed she had
carried him off from the coquettish Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he

was her sister's happy lover. Such adoration in young girls is
stronger than all social condemnations. To Bettina's thinking, justice

had been deceived; if not, how could it have sentenced a man who had
loved her for six months?--loved her to distraction in the hidden

retreat to which he had taken her,--that he might, we may add, be at
liberty to go his own way. Thus the dying girl inoculated her sister

with love. Together they talked of the great drama which imagination
enhances; and Bettina carried with her to the grave her sister's

ignorance, leaving her, if not informed, at least thirsting for
information.

Nevertheless, remorse had set its fangs too sharply in Bettina's heart
not to force her to warn her sister. In the midst of her own

confessions she had preached duty and implicit obedience to Modeste.
On the evening of her death she implored her to remember the tears

that soaked her pillow, and not to imitate a conduct which even
suffering could not expiate. Bettina accused herself of bringing a

curse upon the family, and died in despair at being unable to obtain
her father's pardon. Notwithstanding the consolations which the

ministers of religion, touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she
cried in heartrending tones with her latest breath: "Oh father!

father!" "Never give your heart without your hand," she said to
Modeste an hour before she died; "and above all, accept no attentions

from any man without telling everything to papa and mamma."
These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the

hour of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had
exacted a solemn oath. The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from

beneath her pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid,
Francoise Cochet, to be engraved in Havre with these words, "Think of

Bettina, 1827," and placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to
keep it there until she married. Thus there had been between these two

young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless
visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north

wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were
always subordinate to their horror of evil.

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die
under a roof of elegantpoverty, the failure of her father, the

baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by
grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone

the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends
can take the place of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the

dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay
cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the

provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and
the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in

the equinoctial storms,--all this monastic tranquillity did in fact
hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the

spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young
girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her

plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of
a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it

were to watch for the passing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the
expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under

the fire of Dumay's pistols.
During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung

herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in
it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German

quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the

matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three

literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great

works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,

from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in

its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming

admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event; a
masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her

happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her
heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the