It was a fair morning in June: the sky was a bright, deep, lovely, speckless blue: the flowers and bushes poured perfume, and sprinkled song upon the balmy air. On such a day, so calm, so warm, so bright, so scented, so tuneful, to live and to be young is to be happy. With gentle hand it wipes all other days out of the memory; it smiles, it smells, it sings, and clouds and rain and biting wind seem as far off and impossible as grief and trouble.

Camille and Josephine had stolen out, and strolled lazily up and down close under the house, drinking the sweet air, fragrant with perfume and melody; the blue sky, and love.

Rose was in the house. She had missed them; but she thought they must be near; for they seldom took long walks early in the day. Meeting Jacintha on the landing of the great staircase, she asked her where her sister was.

"Madame Raynal is gone for a walk. She has taken the colonel with her. You know she always takes the colonel out with her now."

"That will do. You can finish your work."

Jacintha went into Camille's room.

Rose, who had looked as grave as a judge while Jacintha was present, bubbled into laughter. She even repeated Jacintha's words aloud, and chuckled over them. "You know she always takes the colonel out with her now--ha, ha, ha!"

"Rose!" sighed a distant voice.

She looked round, and saw the baroness at some distance in the corridor, coming slowly towards her, with eyes bent gloomily on the ground. Rose composed her features into a settled gravity, and went to meet her.

"I wish to speak with you," said the baroness; "let us sit down; it is cool here."

Rose ran and brought a seat without a back, but well stuffed, and set it against the wall. The old lady sat down and leaned back, and looked at Rose in silence a good while; then she said,--

"There is room for you; sit down, for I want to speak seriously to you."

"Yes, mamma; what is it?"

"Turn a little round, and let me see your face."

Rose complied; and began to feel a little uneasy.

"Perhaps you can guess what I am going to say to you?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, I am going to put a question to you."

"With all my heart, dear mamma."

"I invite you to explain to me the most singular, the most unaccountable thing that ever fell under my notice. Will you do this for your mother?"

"O mamma! of course I will do anything to please you that I can; but, indeed, I don't know what you mean."

"I am going to tell you."

The old lady paused. The young one, naturally enough, felt a chill of vague anxiety strike across her frame.

"Rose," said the old lady, speaking very gently but firmly, and leaning in a peculiar way on her words, while her eye worked like an ice gimlet on her daughter's face, "a little while ago, when my poor Raynal--our benefactor--was alive--and I was happy--you all chilled my happiness by your gloom: the whole house seemed a house of mourning--tell me now why was this."

"Mamma!" said Rose, after a moment's hesitation, "we could hardly be gay. Sickness in the house! And if Colonel Raynal was alive, still he was absent, and in danger."

"Oh! then it was out of regard for him we were all dispirited?"

"Why, I suppose so," said Rose, stoutly; but then colored high at her own want of candor. However, she congratulated herself that her mother's suspicion was confined to past events.

Her self-congratulation on that score was short; for the baroness, after eying her grimly for a second or two in silence, put her this awkward question plump.

"If so, tell me why is it that ever since that black day when the news of his death reached us, the whole house has gone into black, and has gone out of mourning?"

"Mamma," stammered Rose, "what do you mean?"

"Even poor Camille, who was so pale and wan, has recovered like magic."

"O mamma! is not that fancy?" said Rose, piteously. "Of what do you suspect me? Can you think I am unfeeling--ungrateful? I should not be your daughter."

"No, no," said the baroness, "to do you justice, you attempt sorrow; as you put on black. But, my poor child, you do it with so little skill that one sees a horrible gayety breaking through that thin disguise: you are no true mourners: you are like the mutes or the undertakers at a funeral, forced grief on the surface of your faces, and frightful complacency below."

"Tra la! lal! la! la! Tra la! la! Tra la! la!" carolled Jacintha, in the colonel's room hard by.

The ladies looked at one another: Rose in great confusion.

"Tra la! la! la! Tra lal! lal! la! la! la!"

"Jacintha!" screamed Rose angrily.

"Hush! not a word," said the baroness. "Why remonstrate with her? Servants are but chameleons: they take the color of those they serve. Do not cry. I wanted your confidence, not your tears, love. There, I will not twice in one day ask you for your heart: it would be to lower the mother, and give the daughter the pain of refusing it, and the regret, sure to come one day, of having refused it. I will discover the meaning of it all by myself." She went away with a gentle sigh; and Rose was cut to the heart by her words; she resolved, whatever it might cost her and Josephine, to make a clean breast this very day. As she was one of those who act promptly, she went instantly in search of her sister, to gain her consent, if possible.

Now, the said Josephine was in the garden walking with Camille, and uttering a wife's tender solicitudes.

"And must you leave me? must you risk your life again so soon; the life on which mine depends?"

"My dear, that letter I received from headquarters two days ago, that inquiry whether my wound was cured. A hint, Josephine--a hint too broad for any soldier not to take."

"Camille, you are very proud," said Josephine, with an accent of reproach, and a look of approval.

"I am obliged to be. I am the husband of the proudest woman in France."

"Hush! not so loud: there is Dard on the grass."

"Dard!" muttered the soldier with a word of meaning. "Josephine," said he after a pause, and a little peevishly, "how much longer are we to lower our voices, and turn away our eyes from each other, and be ashamed of our happiness?"

"Five months longer, is it not?" answered Josephine quietly.

"Five months longer!"

Josephine was hurt at this, and for once was betrayed into a serious and merited remonstrance.

"Is this just?" said she. "Think of two months ago: yes, but two months ago, you were dying. You doubted my love, because it could not overcome my virtue and my gratitude: yet you might have seen it was destroying my life. Poor Raynal, my husband, my benefactor, died. Then I could do more for you, if not with delicacy, at least with honor; but no! words, and looks, and tender offices of love were not enough, I must give stronger proof. Dear Camille, I have been reared in a strict school: and perhaps none of your sex can know what it cost me to go to Frejus that day with him I love."

"My own Josephine!"

"I made but one condition: that you would not rob me of my mother's respect: to her our hasty marriage would appear monstrous, heartless. You consented to be secretly happy for six months. One fortnight has passed, and you are discontented again."

"Oh, no! do not think so. It is every word true. I am an ungrateful villain."

"How dare you say so? and to me! No! but you are a man."

"So I have been told; but my conduct to you, sweet one, has not been that of a man from first to last. Yet I could die for you, with a smile on my lips. But when I think that once I lifted this sacrilegious hand against your life--oh!"

"Do not be silly, Camille. I love you all the better for loving me well enough to kill me. What woman would not? I tell you, you foolish thing, you are a man: monseigneur is one of the lordly sex, that is accustomed to have everything its own way. My love, in a world that is full of misery, here are two that are condemned to be secretly happy a few months longer: a hard fate for one of your sex, it seems: but it is so much sweeter than the usual lot of mine, that really I cannot share your misery," and she smiled joyously.

"Then share my happiness, my dear wife."

"I do; only mine is deep, not loud."

"Why, Dard is gone, and we are out of doors; will the little birds betray us?"

"The lower windows are open, and I saw Jacintha in one of the rooms."

"Jacintha? we are in awe of the very servants. Well, if I must not say it loud I will say it often," and putting his mouth to her ear, he poured a burning whisper of love into it--"My love! my angel! my wife! my wife! my wife!"

She turned her swimming eyes on him.

"My husband!" she whispered in return.

Rose came out, and found them billing and cooing. "You must not be so happy, you two," said she authoritatively.

"How can we help it?" asked Camille.

"You must and shall help it, somehow," retorted this little tyrant. "Mamma suspects. She has given me such a cross-examination, my blood runs cold. No, on second thoughts, kiss her again, and you may both be as happy as you like; for I am going to tell mamma all, and no power on earth shall hinder me."

"Rose," said Camille, "you are a sensible girl; and I always said so."

But Josephine was horrified. "What! tell my mother that within a month of my husband's death?"--

"Don't say your husband," put in Camille wincing; "the priest never confirmed that union; words spoken before a magistrate do not make a marriage in the sight of Heaven."

Josephine cut him short. "Amongst honorable men and women all oaths are alike sacred: and Heaven's eye is in a magistrate's room as in a church. A daughter of Beaurepaire gave her hand to him, and called herself his wife. Therefore, she was his wife: and is his widow. She owes him everything; the house you are all living in among the rest. She ought to be proud of her brief connection with that pure, heroic spirit, and, when she is so little noble as to disown him, then say that gratitude and justice have no longer a place among mankind."

"Come into the chapel," said Camille, with a voice that showed he was hurt.

They entered the chapel, and there they saw something that thoroughly surprised them: a marble monument to the memory of Raynal. It leaned at present against the wall below the place prepared to receive it. The inscription, short, but emphatic, and full of feeling, told of the battles he had fought in, including the last fatal skirmish, and his marriage with the heiress of Beaurepaire; and, in a few soldier-like words, the uprightness, simplicity, and generosity of his character.

They were so touched by this unexpected trait in Camille that they both threw their arms round his neck by one impulse. "Am I wrong to be proud of him?" said Josephine, triumphantly.

"Well, don't say too much to me," said Camille, looking down confused. "One tries to be good; but it is very hard--to some of us--not to you, Josephine; and, after all, it is only the truth that we have written on that stone. Poor Raynal! he was my old comrade; he saved me from death, and not a soldier's death--drowning; and he was a better man than I am, or ever shall be. Now he is dead, I can say these things. If I had said them when he was alive, it would have been more to my credit."

They all three went back towards the house; and on the way Rose told them all that had passed between the baroness and her. When she came to the actual details of that conversation, to the words, and looks, and tones, Josephine's uneasiness rose to an overpowering height; she even admitted that further concealment would be very difficult.

"Better tell her than let her find out," said Rose. "We must tell her some day."

At last, after a long and agitated discussion, Josephine consented; but Rose must be the one to tell. "So then, you at least will make your peace with mamma," argued Josephine, "and let us go in and do this before our courage fails; besides, it is going to rain, and it has turned cold. Where have all these clouds come from? An hour ago there was not one in the sky."

They went, with hesitating steps and guilty looks, to the saloon. Their mother was not there. Here was a reprieve.

Rose had an idea. She would take her to the chapel, and show her the monument, and that would please her with poor Camille. "After that," said Rose, "I will begin by telling her all the misery you have both gone through; and, when she pities you, then I will show her it was all my fault your misery ended in a secret marriage."

The confederates sat there in a chilly state, waiting for the baroness. At last, as she did not come, Rose got up to go to her. "When the mind is made up, it is no use being cowardly, and putting off," said she, firmly. For all that, her cheek had but little color left in it, when she left her chair with this resolve.

Now as Rose went down the long saloon to carry out their united resolve, Jacintha looked in; and, after a hasty glance to see who was present, she waited till Rose came up to her, and then whipped a letter from under her apron and gave it her.

"For my mistress," said she, with an air of mystery.

"Why not take it to her, then?" inquired Rose.

"I thought you might like to see it first, mademoiselle," said Jacintha, with quiet meaning.

"Is it from the dear doctor?" asked Josephine.

"La, no, mademoiselle, don't you know the doctor is come home? Why, he has been in the house near an hour. He is with my lady."

The doctor proved Jacintha correct by entering the room in person soon after; on this Rose threw down the letter, and she and the whole party were instantly occupied in greeting him.

When the ladies had embraced him and Camille shaken hands with him, they plied him with a thousand questions. Indeed, he had not half satisfied their curiosity, when Rose happened to catch sight of the letter again, and took it up to carry to the baroness. She now, for the first time, eyed it attentively, and the consequence was she uttered an exclamation, and took the first opportunity to beckon Aubertin.

He came to her; and she put the letter into his hand.

He put up his glasses, and eyed it. "Yes!" whispered he, "it is from him."

Josephine and Camille saw something was going on; they joined the other two, with curiosity in their faces.

Rose put her hand on a small table near her, and leaned a moment. She turned half sick at a letter coming from the dead. Josephine now came towards her with a face of concern, and asked what was the matter.

The reply came from Aubertin. "My poor friends," said he, solemnly, "this is one of those fearful things that you have not seen in your short lives, but it has been more than once my lot to witness it. The ships that carry letters from distant countries vary greatly in speed, and are subject to detaining accidents. Yes, this is the third time I have seen a letter come written by a hand known to be cold. The baroness is a little excited to-day, I don't know from what cause. With your approbation, Madame Raynal, I will read this letter before I let her see it."

"Read it, if you please."

"Shall I read it out?"

"Certainly. There may be some wish expressed in it; oh, I hope there is!"

Camille, from delicacy, retired to some little distance, and the doctor read the letter in a low and solemn voice.

"MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope all are well at Beaurepaire, as I am, or I hope soon to be. I received a wound in our last skirmish; not a very severe one; but it put an end to my writing for some time."

"Poor fellow! it was his death wound. Why, when was this written?-- why," and the doctor paused, and seemed stupefied: "why, my dears, has my memory gone, or"--and again he looked eagerly at the letter-- "what was the date of the battle in which he was killed? for this letter is dated the 15th of May. Is it a dream? no! this was written since the date of his death."

"No, doctor," said Rose, "you deceive yourself."

"Why, what was the date of the Moniteur, then?" asked Aubertin, in great agitation.

"Considerably later than this," said Camille.

"I don't think so; the journal! where is it?"

"My mother has it locked up. I'll run."

"No, Rose; no one but me. Now, Josephine, do not you go and give way to hopes that may be delusive. I must see that journal directly. I will go to the baroness. I shall excuse her less than you would."

He was scarcely gone when a cry of horror filled the room, a cry as of madness falling like a thunderbolt on a human mind. It was Josephine, who up to this had not uttered one word. But now she stood, white as a corpse, in the middle of the room, and wrung her hands. "What have I done? What shall I do? It was the 3d of May. I see it before me in letters of fire; the 3d of May! the 3d of May!--and he writes the 15th."

"No! no!" cried Camille wildly. "It was long, long after the 3d."

"It was the 3d of May," repeated Josephine in a hoarse voice that none would have known for hers.

Camille ran to her with words of comfort and hope; he did not share her fears. He remembered about when the Moniteur came, though not the very day. He threw his arm lovingly round her as if to protect her against these shadowy terrors. Her dilating eyes seemed fixed on something distant in space or time, at some horrible thing coming slowly towards her. She did not see Camille approach her, but the moment she felt him she turned upon him swiftly.

"Do you love me?" still in the hoarse voice that had so little in it of Josephine. "I mean, does one grain of respect or virtue mingle in your love for me?"

"What words are these, my wife?"

"Then leave Raynal's house upon the instant. You wonder I can be so cruel? I wonder too; and that I can see my duty so clear in one short moment. But I have lived twenty years since that letter came. Oh! my brain has whirled through a thousand agonies. And I have come back a thousand times to the same thing; you and I must see each other's face no more."

"Oh!" cried Rose, "is there no way but this?"

"Take care," she screamed, wildly, to her and Camille, "I am on the verge of madness; is it for you two to thrust me over the precipice? Come, now, if you are a man of honor, if you have a spark of gratitude towards the poor woman who has given you all except her fair name--that she will take to the grave in spite of you all-- promise that you will leave Raynal's house this minute if he is alive, and let me die in honor as I have lived."

"No, no!" cried Camille, terror-stricken; "it cannot be. Heaven is merciful, and Heaven sees how happy we are. Be calm! these are idle fears; be calm! I say. For if it is so I will obey you. I will stay; I will go; I will die; I will live; I will obey you."

"Swear this to me by the thing you hold most sacred," she almost shrieked.

"I swear by my love for you," was his touching reply.

Ere they had recovered a miserable composure after this passionate outburst, all the more terrible as coming from a creature so tender as Josephine, agitated voices were heard at the door, and the baroness tottered in, followed by the doctor, who was trying in vain to put some bounds to her emotion and her hopes.

"Oh, my children! my children!" cried she, trembling violently. "Here, Rose, my hands shake so; take this key, open the cabinet, there is the Moniteur. What is the date?"

The journal was found, and rapidly examined. The date was the 20th of May.

"There!" cried Camille. "I told you!"

The baroness uttered a feeble moan. Her hopes died as suddenly as they had been born, and she sank drooping into a chair, with a bitter sigh.

Camille stole a joyful look at Josephine. She was in the same attitude looking straight before her as at a coming horror. Presently Rose uttered a faint cry, "The battle was before."

"To be sure," cried the doctor. "You forget, it is not the date of the paper we want, but of the battle it records. For Heaven's sake, when was the battle?"

"The 3d of May," said Josephine, in a voice that seemed to come from the tomb.

Rose's hands that held the journal fell like a dead weight upon her knees, journal and all. She whispered, "It was the 3d of May."

"Ah!" cried the baroness, starting up, "he may yet be alive. He must be alive. Heaven is merciful! Heaven would not take my son from me, a poor old woman who has not long to live. There was a letter; where is the letter?"

"Are we mad, not to read the letter?" said the doctor. "I had it; it has dropped from my old fingers when I went for the journal."

A short examination of the room showed the letter lying crumpled up near the door. Camille gave it to the baroness. She tried to read it, but could not.

"I am old," said she; "my hand shakes and my eyes are troubled. This young gentleman will read it to us. His eyes are not dim and troubled. Something tells me that when I hear this letter, I shall find out whether my son lives. Why do you not read it to me, Camille?" cried she, almost fiercely.

Camille, thus pressed, obeyed mechanically, and began to read Raynal's letter aloud, scarce knowing what he did, but urged and driven by the baroness.

"MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope all are well at Beaurepaire, as I am, or I hope soon to be. I received a wound in our last skirmish; not a very severe one, but it put an end to my writing for some time."

"Go on, dear Camille! go on."

"The page ends there, madame,"

The paper was thin, and Camille, whose hand trembled, had some difficulty in detaching the leaves from one another. He succeeded, however, at last, and went on reading and writhing.

"By the way, you must address your next letter to me as Colonel Raynal. I was promoted just before this last affair, but had not time to tell you; and my wound stopped my writing till now."

"There, there!" cried the baroness. "He was Colonel Raynal, and Colonel Raynal was not killed."

The doctor implored her not to interrupt.

"Go on, Camille. Why do you hesitate? what is the matter? Do for pity's sake go on, sir."

Camille cast a look of agony around, and put his hand to his brow, on which large drops of cold perspiration, like a death dew, were gathering; but driven to the stake on all sides, he gasped on rather than read, for his eye had gone down the page.

"A namesake of mine, Commandant Raynal,"--

"Ah!"

"has not been--so fortunate. He"--

"Go on! go on!"

The wretched man could now scarcely utter Raynal's words; they came from him in a choking groan.

"he was killed, poor fellow! while heading a gallant charge upon the enemy's flank."

He ground the letter convulsively in his hand, then it fell all crumpled on the floor.

"Bless you, Camille!" cried the baroness, "bless you! bless you! I have a son still."

She stooped with difficulty, took up the letter, and, kissing it again and again, fell on her knees, and thanked Heaven aloud before them all. Then she rose and went hastily out, and her voice was heard crying very loud, "Jacintha! Jacintha!"

The doctor followed in considerable anxiety for the effects of this violent joy on so aged a person. Three remained behind, panting and pale like those to whom dead Lazarus burst the tomb, and came forth in a moment, at a word. Then Camille half kneeled, half fell, at Josephine's feet, and, in a voice choked with sobs, bade her dispose of him.

She turned her head away. "Do not speak to me; do not look at me; if we look at one another, we are lost. Go! die at your post, and I at mine."

He bowed his head, and kissed her dress, then rose calm as despair, and white as death, and, with his knees knocking under him, tottered away like a corpse set moving.

He disappeared from the house.

The baroness soon came back, triumphant and gay.

"I have sent her to bid them ring the bells in the village. The poor shall be feasted; all shall share our joy: my son was dead, and lives. Oh, joy! joy! joy!"

"Mother!" shrieked Josephine.

"Mad woman that I am, I am too boisterous. Help me, Rose! she is going to faint; her lips are white."

Dr. Aubertin and Rose brought a chair. They forced Josephine into it. She was not the least faint; yet her body obeyed their hands just like a dead body. The baroness melted into tears; tears streamed from Rose's eyes. Josephine's were dry and stony, and fixed on coming horror. The baroness looked at her with anxiety. "Thoughtless old woman! It was too sudden; it is too much for my dear child; too much for me," and she kneeled, and laid her aged head on her daughter's bosom, saying feebly through her tears, "too much joy, too much joy!"

Josephine took no notice of her. She sat like one turned to stone looking far away over her mother's head with rigid eyes fixed on the air and on coming horrors.

Rose felt her arm seized. It was Aubertin. He too was pale now, though not before. He spoke in a terrible whisper to Rose, his eye fixed on the woman of stone that sat there.

"Is this joy?"

Rose, by a mighty effort, raised her eyes and confronted his full. "What else should it be?" said she.

And with these words this Spartan girl was her sister's champion once more against all comers, friend or foe.

Dr. Aubertin received one day a note from a publishing bookseller, to inquire whether he still thought of giving the world his valuable work on insects. The doctor was amazed. "My valuable work! Why, Rose, they all refused it, and this person in particular recoiled from it as if my insects could sting on paper."

The above led to a correspondence, in which the convert to insects explained that the work must be published at the author's expense, the publisher contenting himself with the profits. The author, thirsting for the public, consented. Then the publisher wrote again to say that the immortal treatise must be spiced; a little politics flung in: "Nothing goes down, else." The author answered in some heat that he would not dilute things everlasting with the fleeting topics of the day, nor defile science with politics. On this his Mentor smoothed him down, despising him secretly for not seeing that a book is a matter of trade and nothing else. It ended in Aubertin going to Paris to hatch his Phoenix. He had not been there a week, when a small deputation called on him, and informed him he had been elected honorary member of a certain scientific society. The compliment was followed by others, till at last certain ladies, with the pliancy of their sex, find out they had always secretly cared for butterflies. Then the naturalist smelt a rat, or, in other words, began to scent that entomology, a form of idiocy in a poor man, is a graceful decoration of the intellect in a rich one.

Philosopher without bile, he saw through this, and let it amuse, not shock him. His own species, a singularly interesting one in my opinion, had another trait in reserve for him.

He took a world of trouble to find out the circumstances of his nephew's nephews and nieces: then he made arrangements for distributing a large part of his legacy among them. His intentions and the proportions of his generosity transpired.

Hitherto they had been silent, but now they all fell-to and abused him: each looking only to the amount of his individual share, not at the sum total the doctor was giving way to an ungrateful lot.

The donor was greatly amused, and noted down the incident and some of the remarks in his commonplace book, under the general head of "Bestiarium;" and the particular head of "Homo."

Paris with its seductions netted the good doctor, and held him two or three months; would have detained him longer, but for alarming accounts the baroness sent of Josephine's health. These determined him to return to Beaurepaire; and, must I own it, the announcement was no longer hailed at Beaurepaire with universal joy as heretofore.

Josephine Raynal, late Dujardin, is by this time no stranger to my intelligent reader. I wish him to bring his knowledge of her character and her sensibility to my aid. Imagine, as the weary hours and days and weeks roll over her head, what this loving woman feels for her lover whom she has dismissed; what this grateful wife feels for the benefactor she has unwittingly wronged; but will never wrong with her eyes open; what this lady pure as snow, and proud as fire, feels at the seeming frailty into which a cruel combination of circumstances has entrapped her.

Put down the book a moment: shut your eyes: and imagine this strange and complicated form of human suffering.

Her mental sufferings were terrible; and for some time Rose feared for her reason. At last her agonies subsided into a listlessness and apathy little less alarming. She seemed a creature descending inch by inch into the tomb. Indeed, I fully believe she would have died of despair: but one of nature's greatest forces stepped into the arena and fought on the side of life. She was affected with certain bilious symptoms that added to Rose's uneasiness, but Jacintha assured her it was nothing, and would retire and leave the sufferer better. Jacintha, indeed, seemed now to take a particular interest in Josephine, and was always about her with looks of pity and interest.

"Good creature!" thought Rose, "she sees my sister is unhappy: and that makes her more attentive and devoted to her than ever."

One day these three were together in Josephine's room. Josephine was mechanically combing her long hair, when all of a sudden she stretched out her hand and cried, "Rose!"

Rose ran to her, and coming behind her saw in the glass that her lips were colorless. She screamed to Jacintha, and between them they supported Josephine to the bed. She had hardly touched it when she fainted dead away. "Mamma! mamma!" cried Rose in her terror.

"Hush!" cried Jacintha roughly, "hold your tongue: it is only a faint. Help me loosen her: don't make any noise, whatever." They loosened her stays, and applied the usual remedies, but it was some time before she came-to. At last the color came back to her lips, then to her cheek, and the light to her eye. She smiled feebly on Jacintha and Rose, and asked if she had not been insensible.

"Yes, love, and frightened us--a little--not much--oh, dear! oh, dear!"

"Don't be alarmed, sweet one, I am better. And I will never do it again, since it frightens you." Then Josephine said to her sister in a low voice, and in the Italian language, "I hoped it was death, my sister; but he comes not to the wretched."

"If you hoped that," replied Rose in the same language, "you do not love your poor sister who so loves you."

While the Italian was going on, Jacintha's dark eyes glanced suspiciously on each speaker in turn. But her suspicions were all wide of the mark.

"Now may I go and tell mamma?" asked Rose.

"No, mademoiselle, you shall not," said Jacintha. "Madame Raynal, do take my side, and forbid her."

"Why, what is it to you?" said Rose, haughtily.

"If it was not something to me, should I thwart my dear young lady?"

"No. And you shall have your own way, if you will but condescend to give me a reason."

This to some of us might appear reasonable, but not to Jacintha: it even hurt her feelings.

"Mademoiselle Rose," she said, "when you were little and used to ask me for anything, did I ever say to you, 'Give me a reason first'?"

"There! she is right," said Josephine. "We should not make terms with tried friends. Come, we will pay her devotion this compliment. It is such a small favor. For my part I feel obliged to her for asking it."

Josephine's health improved steadily from that day. Her hollow cheeks recovered their plump smoothness, and her beauty its bloom, and her person grew more noble and statue-like than ever, and within she felt a sense of indomitable vitality. Her appetite had for some time been excessively feeble and uncertain, and her food tasteless; but of late, by what she conceived to be a reaction such as is common after youth has shaken off a long sickness, her appetite had been not only healthy but eager. The baroness observed this, and it relieved her of a large portion of her anxiety. One day at dinner her maternal heart was so pleased with Josephine's performance that she took it as a personal favor, "Well done, Josephine," said she; "that gives your mother pleasure to see you eat again. Soup and bouillon: and now twice you have been to Rose for some of that pate, which does you so much credit, Jacintha."

Josephine colored high at this compliment.

"It is true," said she, "I eat like a pig;" and, with a furtive glance at the said pate, she laid down her knife and fork, and ate no more of anything. The baroness had now a droll misgiving.

"The doctor will be angry with me," said she: "he will find her as well as ever."

"Madame," said Jacintha hastily, "when does the doctor come, if I may make so bold, that I may get his room ready, you know?"

"Well thought of, Jacintha. He comes the day after to-morrow, in the afternoon."

At night when the young ladies went up to bed, what did they find but a little cloth laid on a little table in Josephine's room, and the remains of the pate she had liked. Rose burst out laughing. "Look at that dear duck of a goose, Jacintha! Our mother's flattery sank deep: she thinks we can eat her pates at all hours of the day and night. Shall I send it away?"

"No," said Josephine, "that would hurt her culinary pride, and perhaps her affection: only cover it up, dear, for just now I am not in the humor: it rather turns me."

It was covered up. The sisters retired to rest. In the morning Rose lifted the cover and found the plate cleared, polished. She was astounded.

The large tapestried chamber, once occupied by Camille Dujardin, was now turned into a sitting-room, and it was a favorite on account of the beautiful view from the windows.

One day Josephine sat there alone with some work in her hand; but the needle often stopped, and the fair head drooped. She heaved a deep sigh. To her surprise it was echoed by a sigh that, like her own, seemed to come from a heart full of sighs.

She turned hastily round and saw Jacintha.

Now Josephine had all a woman's eye for reading faces, and she was instantly struck by a certain gravity in Jacintha's gaze, and a flutter which the young woman was suppressing with tolerable but not complete success.

Disguising the uneasiness this discovery gave her, she looked her visitor full in the face, and said mildly, but a little coldly, "Well, Jacintha?"

Jacintha lowered her eyes and muttered slowly,--

"The doctor--comes--to-day," then raised her eyes all in a moment to take Josephine off her guard; but the calm face was impenetrable. So then Jacintha added, "to our misfortune," throwing in still more meaning.

"To our misfortune? A dear old friend--like him?"

Jacintha explained. "That old man makes me shake. You are never safe with him. So long as his head is in the clouds, you might take his shoes off, and on he'd walk and never know it; but every now and then he comes out of the clouds all in one moment, without a word of warning, and when he does his eye is on everything, like a bird's. Then he is so old: he has seen a heap. Take my word for it, the old are more knowing than the young, let them be as sharp as you like: the old have seen everything. We have only heard talk of the most part, with here and there a glimpse. To know life to the bottom you must live it out, from the soup to the dessert; and that is what the doctor has done, and now he is coming here. And Mademoiselle Rose will go telling him everything; and if she tells him half what she has seen, your secret will be no secret to that old man."

"My secret!" gasped Josephine, turning pale.

"Don't look so, madame: don't be frightened at poor Jacintha. Sooner or later you must trust somebody besides Mademoiselle Rose."

Josephine looked at her with inquiring, frightened eyes.

Jacintha drew nearer to her.

"Mademoiselle,--I beg pardon, madame,--I carried you in my arms when I was a child. When I was a girl you toddled at my side, and held my gown, and lisped my name, and used to put your little arms round my neck, and kissed me, you would; and if ever I had the least pain or sickness your dear little face would turn as sorrowful, and all the pretty color leave it for Jacintha; and now you are in trouble, in sore trouble, yet you turn away from me, you dare not trust me, that would be cut in pieces ere I would betray you. Ah, mademoiselle, you are wrong. The poor can feel: they have all seen trouble, and a servant is the best of friends where she has the heart to love her mistress; and do not I love you? Pray do not turn from her who has carried you in her arms, and laid you to sleep upon her bosom, many's and many's the time."

Josephine panted audibly. She held out her hand eloquently to Jacintha, but she turned her head away and trembled.

Jacintha cast a hasty glance round the room. Then she trembled too at what she was going to say, and the effect it might have on the young lady. As for Josephine, terrible as the conversation had become, she made no attempt to evade it: she remained perfectly passive. It was the best way to learn how far Jacintha had penetrated her secret, if at all.

Jacintha looked fearfully round and whispered in Josephine's ear, "When the news of Colonel Raynal's death came, you wept, but the color came back to your cheek. When the news of his life came, you turned to stone. Ah! my poor young lady, there has been more between you and that man than should be. Ever since one day you all went to Frejus together, you were a changed woman. I have seen you look at him as--as a wife looks at her man. I have seen him"--

"Hush, Jacintha! Do not tell me what you have seen: oh! do not remind me of joys I pray God to help me forget. He was my husband, then!--oh, cruel Jacintha, to remind me of what I have been, of what I am! Ah me! ah me! ah me!"

"Your husband!" cried Jacintha in utter amazement.

Then Josephine drooped her head on this faithful creature's shoulder, and told her with many sobs the story I have told you. She told it very briefly, for it was to a woman who, though little educated, was full of feeling and shrewdness, and needed but the bare facts: she could add the rest from her own heart and experience: could tell the storm of feelings through which these two unhappy lovers must have passed. Her frequent sighs of pity and sympathy drew Josephine on to pour out all her griefs. When the tale was ended she gave a sigh of relief.

"It might have been worse: I thought it was worse the more fool I. I deserve to have my head cut off." This was Jacintha's only comment at that time.

It was Josephine's turn to be amazed. "It could have been worse?" said she. "How? tell me," added she bitterly. "It would be a consolation to me, could I see that."

Jacintha colored and evaded this question, and begged her to go on, to keep nothing back from her. Josephine assured her she had revealed all. Jacintha looked at her a moment in silence.

"It is then as I half suspected. You do not know all that is before you. You do not see why I am afraid of that old man."

"No, not of him in particular."

"Nor why I want to keep Mademoiselle Rose from prattling to him?"

"No. I assure you Rose is to be trusted; she is wise--wiser than I am."

"You are neither of you wise. You neither of you know anything. My poor young mistress, you are but a child still. You have a deep water to wade through," said Jacintha, so solemnly that Josephine trembled. "A deep water, and do not see it even. You have told me what is past, now I must tell you what is coming. Heaven help me! But is it possible you have no misgiving? Tell the truth, now."

"Alas! I am full of them; at your words, at your manner, they fly around me in crowds."

"Have you no one?"

"No."

"Then turn your head from me a bit, my sweet young lady; I am an honest woman, though I am not so innocent as you, and I am forced against my will to speak my mind plainer than I am used to."

Then followed a conversation, to detail which might anticipate our story; suffice it to say, that Rose, coming into the room rather suddenly, found her sister weeping on Jacintha's bosom, and Jacintha crying and sobbing over her.

She stood and stared in utter amazement.

Dr. Aubertin, on his arrival, was agreeably surprised at Madame Raynal's appearance. He inquired after her appetite.

"Oh, as to her appetite," cried the baroness, "that is immense."

"Indeed!"

"It was," explained Josephine, "just when I began to get better, but now it is as much as usual." This answer had been arranged beforehand by Jacintha. She added, "The fact is, we wanted to see you, doctor, and my ridiculous ailments were a good excuse for tearing you from Paris."--"And now we have succeeded," said Rose, "let us throw off the mask, and talk of other things; above all, of Paris, and your eclat."

"For all that," persisted the baroness, "she was ill, when I first wrote, and very ill too."

"Madame Raynal," said the doctor solemnly, "your conduct has been irregular; once ill, and your illness announced to your medical adviser, etiquette forbade you to get well but by his prescriptions. Since, then, you have shown yourself unfit to conduct a malady, it becomes my painful duty to forbid you henceforth ever to be ill at all, without my permission first obtained in writing."

This badinage was greatly relished by Rose, but not at all by the baroness, who was as humorless as a swan.

He stayed a month at Beaurepaire, then off to Paris again: and being now a rich man, and not too old to enjoy innocent pleasures, he got a habit of running backwards and forwards between the two places, spending a month or so at each alternately. So the days rolled on. Josephine fell into a state that almost defies description; her heart was full of deadly wounds, yet it seemed, by some mysterious, half-healing balm, to throb and ache, but bleed no more. Beams of strange, unreasonable complacency would shoot across her; the next moment reflection would come, she would droop her head, and sigh piteously. Then all would merge in a wild terror of detection. She seemed on the borders of a river of bliss, new, divine, and inexhaustible: and on the other bank mocking malignant fiends dared her to enter that heavenly stream. The past to her was full of regrets; the future full of terrors, and empty of hope. Yet she did not, could not succumb. Instead of the listlessness and languor of a few months back, she had now more energy than ever; at times it mounted to irritation. An activity possessed her: it broke out in many feminine ways. Among the rest she was seized with what we men call a cacoethes of the needle: "a raging desire" for work. Her fingers itched for work. She was at it all day. As devotees retire to pray, so she to stitch. On a wet day she would often slip into the kitchen, and ply the needle beside Jacintha: on a dry day she would hide in the old oak-tree, and sit like a mouse, and ply the tools of her craft, and make things of no mortal use to man or woman; and she tried little fringes of muslin upon her white hand, and held it up in front of her, and smiled, and then moaned. It was winter, and Rose used sometimes to bring her out a thick shawl, as she sat in the old oak-tree stitching, but Josephine nearly always declined it. She was nearly impervious to cold.

Then, her purse being better filled than formerly, she visited the poor more than ever, and above all the young couples; and took a warm interest in their household matters, and gave them muslin articles of her own making, and sometimes sniffed the soup in a young housewife's pot, and took a fancy to it, and, if invited to taste it, paid her the compliment of eating a good plateful of it, and said it was much better soup than the chateau produced, and, what is stranger, thought so: and, whenever some peevish little brat set up a yell in its cradle and the father naturally enough shook his fist at the destroyer of his peace, Madame Raynal's lovely face filled with concern not for the sufferer but the pest, and she flew to it and rocked it and coaxed it and consoled it, till the young housewife smiled and stopped its mouth by other means. And, besides the five-franc pieces she gave the infants to hold, these visits of Madame Raynal were always followed by one from Jacintha with a basket of provisions on her stalwart arm, and honest Sir John Burgoyne peeping out at the corner. Kind and beneficent as she was, her temper deteriorated considerably, for it came down from angelic to human. Rose and Jacintha were struck with the change, assented to everything she said, and encouraged her in everything it pleased her caprice to do. Meantime the baroness lived on her son Raynal's letters (they came regularly twice a month). Rose too had a correspondence, a constant source of delight to her. Edouard Riviere was posted at a distance, and could not visit her; but their love advanced rapidly. Every day he wrote down for his Rose the acts of the day, and twice a week sent the budget to his sweetheart, and told her at the same time every feeling of his heart. She was less fortunate than he; she had to carry a heavy secret; but still she found plenty to tell him, and tender feelings too to vent on him in her own arch, shy, fitful way. Letters can enchain hearts; it was by letters that these two found themselves imperceptibly betrothed. Their union was looked forward to as certain, and not very distant. Rose was fairly in love.

One day, Dr. Aubertin, coming back from Paris to Beaurepaire rather suddenly, found nobody at home but the baroness. Josephine and Rose were gone to Frejus; had been there more than a week. She was ailing again; so as Frejus had agreed with her once, Rose thought it might again. "She would send for them back directly."

"No," said the doctor, "why do that? I will go over there and see them." Accordingly, a day or two after this, he hired a carriage, and went off early in the morning to Frejus. In so small a place he expected to find the young ladies at once; but, to his surprise, no one knew them nor had heard of them. He was at a nonplus, and just about to return home and laugh at himself and the baroness for this wild-goose chase, when he fell in with a face he knew, one Mivart, a surgeon, a young man of some talent, who had made his acquaintance in Paris. Mivart accosted him with great respect; and, after the first compliments, informed him that he had been settled some months in this little town, and was doing a fair stroke of business.

"Killing some, and letting nature cure others, eh?" said the doctor; then, having had his joke, he told Mivart what had brought him to Frejus.

"Are they pretty women, your friends? I think I know all the pretty women about," said Mivart with levity. "They are not pretty," replied Aubertin. Mivart's interest in them faded visibly out of his countenance. "But they are beautiful. The elder might pass for Venus, and the younger for Hebe."

"I know them then!" cried he; "they are patients of mine."

The doctor colored. "Ah, indeed!"

"In the absence of your greater skill," said Mivart, politely; "it is Madame Aubertin and her sister you are looking for, is it not?"

Aubertin groaned. "I am rather too old to be looking for a Madame Aubertin," said he; "no; it is Madame Raynal, and Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire."

Mivart became confidential. "Madame Aubertin and her sister," said he, "are so lovely they make me ill to look at them: the deepest blue eyes you ever saw, both of them; high foreheads; teeth like ivory mixed with pearl; such aristocratic feet and hands; and their arms--oh!" and by way of general summary the young surgeon kissed the tips of his fingers, and was silent; language succumbed under the theme. The doctor smiled coldly.

Mivart added, "If you had come an hour sooner, you might have seen Mademoiselle Rose; she was in the town."

"Mademoiselle Rose? who is that?"

"Why, Madame Aubertin's sister."

At this Dr. Aubertin looked first very puzzled, then very grave.

"Hum!" said he, after a little reflection, "where do these paragons live?"

"They lodge at a small farm; it belongs to a widow; her name is Roth." They parted. Dr. Aubertin walked slowly towards his carriage, his hands behind him, his eyes on the ground. He bade the driver inquire where the Widow Roth lived, and learned it was about half a league out of the town. He drove to the farmhouse; when the carriage drove up, a young lady looked out of the window on the first floor. It was Rose de Beaurepaire. She caught the doctor's eye, and he hers. She came down and welcomed him with a great appearance of cordiality, and asked him, with a smile, how he found them out.

"From your medical attendant," said the doctor, dryly.

Rose looked keenly in his face.

"He said he was in attendance on two paragons of beauty, blue eyes, white teeth and arms."

"And you found us out by that?" inquired Rose, looking still more keenly at him.

"Hardly; but it was my last chance of finding you, so I came. Where is Madame Raynal?"

"Come into this room, dear friend. I will go and find her."

Full twenty minutes was the doctor kept waiting, and then in came Rose, gayly crying, "I have hunted her high and low, and where do you think my lady was? sitting out in the garden--come."

Sure enough, they found Josephine in the garden, seated on a low chair. She smiled when the doctor came up to her, and asked after her mother. There was an air of languor about her; her color was clear, delicate, and beautiful.

"You have been unwell, my child."

"A little, dear friend; you know me; always ailing, and tormenting those I love."

"Well! but, Josephine, you know this place and this sweet air always set you up. Look at her now, doctor; did you ever see her look better? See what a color. I never saw her look more lovely."

"I never saw her look so lovely; but I have seen her look better. Your pulse. A little languid?"

"Yes, I am a little."

"Do you stay at Beaurepaire?" inquired Rose; "if so, we will come home."

"On the contrary, you will stay here another fortnight," said the doctor, authoritatively.

"Prescribe some of your nice tonics for me, doctor," said Josephine, coaxingly.

"No! I can't do that; you are in the hands of another practitioner."

"What does that matter? You were at Paris."

"It is not the etiquette in our profession to interfere with another man's patients."

"Oh, dear! I am so sorry," began Josephine.

"I see nothing here that my good friend Mivart is not competent to deal with," said the doctor, coldly.

Then followed some general conversation, at the end of which the doctor once more laid his commands on them to stay another fortnight where they were, and bade them good-by.

He was no sooner gone than Rose went to the door of the kitchen, and called out, "Madame Jouvenel! Madame Jouvenel! you may come into the garden again."

The doctor drove away; but, instead of going straight to Beaurepaire, he ordered the driver to return to the town. He then walked to Mivart's house.

In about a quarter of an hour he came out of it, looking singularly grave, sad, and stern.

Edouard Riviere contrived one Saturday to work off all arrears of business, and start for Beaurepaire. He had received a very kind letter from Rose, and his longing to see her overpowered him. On the road his eyes often glittered, and his cheek flushed with expectation. At last he got there. His heart beat: for four months he had not seen her. He ran up into the drawing-room, and there found the baroness alone; she welcomed him cordially, but soon let him know Rose and her sister were at Frejus. His heart sank. Frejus was a long way off. But this was not all. Rose's last letter was dated from Beaurepaire, yet it must have been written at Frejus. He went to Jacintha, and demanded an explanation of this. The ready Jacintha said it looked as if she meant to be home directly; and added, with cool cunning, "That is a hint for me to get their rooms ready."

"This letter must have come here enclosed in another," said Edouard, sternly.

"Like enough," replied Jacintha, with an appearance of sovereign indifference.

Edouard looked at her, and said, grimly, "I will go to Frejus."

"So I would," said Jacintha, faltering a little, but not perceptibly; "you might meet them on the road, if so be they come the same road; there are two roads, you know."

Edouard hesitated; but he ended by sending Dard to the town on his own horse, with orders to leave him at the inn, and borrow a fresh horse. "I shall just have time," said he. He rode to Frejus, and inquired at the inns and post-office for Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire. They did not know her; then he inquired for Madame Raynal. No such name known. He rode by the seaside upon the chance of their seeing him. He paraded on horseback throughout the place, in hopes every moment that a window would open, and a fair face shine at it, and call him. At last his time was up, and he was obliged to ride back, sick at heart, to Beaurepaire. He told the baroness, with some natural irritation, what had happened. She was as much surprised as he was.

"I write to Madame Raynal at the post-office, Frejus," said she.

"And Madame Raynal gets your letters?"

"Of course she does, since she answers them; you cannot have inquired at the post."

"Why, it was the first place I inquired at, and neither Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire nor Madame Raynal were known there."

Jacintha, who could have given the clew, seemed so puzzled herself, that they did not even apply to her. Edouard took a sorrowful leave of the baroness, and set out on his journey home.

Oh! how sad and weary that ride seemed now by what it had been coming. His disappointment was deep and irritating; and ere he had ridden half way a torturer fastened on his heart. That torture is suspicion; a vague and shadowy, but gigantic phantom that oppresses and rends the mind more terribly than certainty. In this state of vague, sickening suspicion, he remained some days: then came an affectionate letter from Rose, who had actually returned home. In this she expressed her regret and disappointment at having missed him; blamed herself for misleading him, but explained that their stay at Frejus had been prolonged from day to day far beyond her expectation. "The stupidity of the post-office was more than she could account for," said she. But, what went farthest to console Edouard, was, that after this contretemps she never ceased to invite him to come to Beaurepaire. Now, before this, though she said many kind and pretty things in her letters, she had never invited him to visit the chateau; he had noticed this. "Sweet soul," thought he, "she really is vexed. I must be a brute to think any more about it. Still"--

So this wound was skinned over.

At last, what he called his lucky star ordained that he should be transferred to the very post his Commandant Raynal had once occupied. He sought and obtained permission to fix his quarters in the little village near Beaurepaire, and though this plan could not be carried out for three months, yet the prospect of it was joyful all that time--joyful to both lovers. Rose needed this consolation, for she was very unhappy: her beloved sister, since their return from Frejus, had gone back. The flush of health was faded, and so was her late energy. She fell into deep depression and languor, broken occasionally by fits of nervous irritation.

She would sit for hours together at one window languishing and fretting. Can the female reader guess which way that window looked?

Now, Edouard was a favorite of Josephine's; so Rose hoped he would help to distract her attention from those sorrows which a lapse of years alone could cure.

On every account, then, his visit was looked forward to with hope and joy.

He came. He was received with open arms. He took up his quarters at his old lodgings, but spent his evenings and every leisure hour at the chateau.

He was very much in love, and showed it. He adhered to Rose like a leech, and followed her about like a little dog.

This would have made her very happy if there had been nothing great to distract her attention and her heart; but she had Josephine, whose deep depression and fits of irritation and terror filled her with anxiety; and so Edouard was in the way now and then. On these occasions he was too vain to see what she was too polite to show him offensively.

But on this she became vexed at his obtuseness.

"Does he think I can be always at his beck and call?" thought she.

"She is always after her sister," said he.

He was just beginning to be jealous of Josephine when the following incident occurred:--

Rose and the doctor were discussing Josephine. Edouard pretended to be reading a book, but he listened to every word.

Dr. Aubertin gave it as his opinion that Madame Raynal did not make enough blood.

"Oh! if I thought that!" cried Rose.

"Well, then, it is so, I assure you."

"Doctor," said Rose, "do you remember, one day you said healthy blood could be drawn from robust veins and poured into a sick person's?"

"It is a well-known fact," said Aubertin.

"I don't believe it," said Rose, dryly.

"Then you place a very narrow limit to science," said the doctor, coldly.

"Did you ever see it done?" asked Rose, slyly.

"I have not only seen it done, but have done it myself."

"Then do it for us. There's my arm; take blood from that for dear Josephine!" and she thrust a white arm out under his eye with such a bold movement and such a look of fire and love as never beamed from common eyes.

A keen, cold pang shot through the human heart of Edouard Riviere.

The doctor started and gazed at her with admiration: then he hung his head. "I could not do it. I love you both too well to drain either of life's current."

Rose veiled her fire, and began to coax. "Once a week; just once a week, dear, dear doctor; you know I should never miss it. I am so full of that health, which Heaven denies to her I love."

"Let us try milder measures first," said the doctor. "I have most faith in time."

"What if I were to take her to Frejus? hitherto, the sea has always done wonders for her."

"Frejus, by all means," said Edouard, mingling suddenly in the conversation; "and this time I will go with you, and then I shall find out where you lodged before, and how the boobies came to say they did not know you."

Rose bit her lip. She could not help seeing then how much dear Edouard was in her way and Josephine's. Their best friends are in the way of all who have secrets. Presently the doctor went to his study. Then Edouard let fall a mock soliloquy. "I wonder," said he, dropping out his words one by one, "whether any one will ever love me well enough to give a drop of their blood for me."

"If you were in sickness and sorrow, who knows?" said Rose, coloring up.

"I would soon be in sickness and sorrow if I thought that."

"Don't jest with such matters, monsieur."

"I am serious. I wish I was as ill as Madame Raynal is, to be loved as she is."

"You must resemble her in some other things to be loved as she is.

"You have often made me feel that of late, dear Rose."

This touched her. But she fought down the kindly feeling. "I am glad of it," said she, out of perverseness. She added after a while, "Edouard, you are naturally jealous."

"Not the least in the world, Rose, I assure you. I have many faults, but jealous I am not."

"Oh, yes, you are, and suspicious, too; there is something in your character that alarms me for our happiness."

"Well, if you come to that, there are things in your conduct I could wish explained."

"There! I said so. You have not confidence in me."

"Pray don't say that, dear Rose. I have every confidence in you; only please don't ask me to divest myself of my senses and my reason."

"I don't ask you to do that or anything else for me; good-by, for the present."

"Where are you going now? tic! tic! I never can get a word in peace with you."

"I am not going to commit murder. I'm only going up-stairs to my sister."

"Poor Madame Raynal, she makes it very hard for me not to dislike her."

"Dislike my Josephine?" and Rose bristled visibly.

"She is an angel, but I should hate an angel if it came forever between you and me."

"Excuse me, she was here long before you. It is you that came between her and me."

"I came because I was told I should be welcome," said Edouard bitterly, and equivocating a little; he added, "and I dare say I shall go when I am told I am one too many."

"Bad heart! who says you are one too many in the house? But you are too exigent, monsieur; you assume the husband, and you tease me. It is selfish; can you not see I am anxious and worried? you ought to be kind to me, and soothe me; that is what I look for from you, and, instead of that, I declare you are getting to be quite a worry."

"I should not be if you loved me as I love you. I give you no rival. Shall I tell you the cause of all this? you have secrets."

"What secrets?"

"Is it me you ask? am I trusted with them? Secrets are a bond that not even love can overcome. It is to talk secrets you run away from me to Madame Raynal. Where did you lodge at Frejus, Mademoiselle the Reticent?"

"In a grotto, dry at low water, Monsieur the Inquisitive."

"That is enough: since you will not tell me, I will find it out before I am a week older."

This alarmed Rose terribly, and drove her to extremities. She decided to quarrel.

"Sir," said she, "I thank you for playing the tyrant a little prematurely; it has put me on my guard. Let us part; you and I are not suited to each other, Edouard Riviere."

He took this more humbly than she expected. "Part!" said he, in consternation; "that is a terrible word to pass between you and me. Forgive me! I suppose I am jealous."

"You are; you are actually jealous of my sister. Well, I tell you plainly I love you, but I love my sister better. I never could love any man as I do her; it is ridiculous to expect such a thing."

"And do you think I could bear to play second fiddle to her all my life?"

"I don't ask you. Go and play first trumpet to some other lady."

"You speak your wishes so plainly now, I have nothing to do but to obey."

He kissed her hand and went away disconsolately.

Rose, instead of going to Josephine, her determination to do which had mainly caused the quarrel, sat sadly down, and leaned her head on her hand. "I am cruel. I am ungrateful. He has gone away broken-hearted. And what shall I do without him?--little fool! I love him better than he loves me. He will never forgive me. I have wounded his vanity; and they are vainer than we are. If we meet at dinner I will be so kind to him, he will forget it all. No! Edouard will not come to dinner. He is not a spaniel that you can beat, and then whistle back again. Something tells me I have lost him, and if I have, what shall I do? I will write him a note. I will ask him to forgive me."

She sat down at the table, and took a sheet of notepaper and began to write a few conciliatory words. She was so occupied in making these kind enough, and not too kind, that a light step approached her unobserved. She looked up and there was Edouard. She whipped the paper off the table.

A look of suspicion and misery crossed Edouard's face.

Rose caught it, and said, "Well, am I to be affronted any more?"

"No, Rose. I came back to beg you to forget what passed just now," said he.

Rose's eye flashed; his return showed her her power. She abused it directly.

"How can I forget it if you come reminding me?"

"Dear Rose, now don't be so unkind, so cruel--I have not come back to tease you, sweet one. I come to know what I can do to please you; to make you love me again?" and he was about to kneel graciously on one knee.

"I'll tell you. Don't come near me for a month."

Edouard started up, white as ashes with mortification and wounded love.

"This is how you treat me for humbling myself, when it is you that ought to ask forgiveness."

"Why should I ask what I don't care about?"

"What do you care about?--except that sister of yours? You have no heart. And on this cold-blooded creature I have wasted a love an empress might have been proud of inspiring. I pray Heaven some man may sport with your affections, you heartless creature, as you have played with mine, and make you suffer what I suffer now!"

And with a burst of inarticulate grief and rage he flung out of the room.

Rose sank trembling on the sofa a little while: then with a mighty effort rose and went to comfort her sister.

Edouard came no more to Beaurepaire.

There is an old French proverb, and a wise one, "Rien n'est certain que l'imprevu;" it means you can make sure of nothing but this, that matters will not turn as you feel sure they will. And, even for this reason, you, who are thinking of suicide because trade is declining, speculation failing, bankruptcy impending, or your life going to be blighted forever by unrequited love--Don't do it. Whether you are English, American, French, or German, listen to a man that knows what is what, and don't do it. I tell you none of those horrors, when they really come, will affect you as you fancy they will. The joys we expect are not a quarter so bright, nor the troubles half so dark as we think they will be. Bankruptcy coming is one thing, come is quite another: and no heart or life was ever really blighted at twenty years of age. The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal alive, all, without exception, marry another man, have brats, and get to screech with laughter when they think of sweetheart No. 1, generally a blockhead, or else a blackguard, whom they were fools enough to wet their clothes for, let alone kill their souls. This happens invariably. The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal dead have fled from a year's misery to eternal pain, from grief that time never failed to cure, to anguish incurable. In this world "Rien n'est certain que l'imprevu."

Edouard and Rose were tender lovers, at a distance. How much happier and more loving they thought they should be beneath the same roof. They came together: their prominent faults of character rubbed: the secret that was in the house did its work: and altogether, they quarrelled. L'imprevu.

Dard had been saying to Jacintha for ever so long, "When granny dies, I will marry you."

Granny died. Dard took possession of her little property. Up came a glittering official, and turned him out; he was not her heir. Perrin, the notary, was. He had bought the inheritance of her two sons, long since dead.

Dard had not only looked on the cottage and cow, as his, but had spoken of them as such for years. The disappointment and the irony of comrades ate into him.

"I will leave this cursed place," said he.

Josephine instantly sent for him to Beaurepaire. He came, and was factotum with the novelty of a fixed salary. Jacintha accommodated him with a new little odd job or two. She set him to dance on the oak floors with a brush fastened to his right foot; and, after a rehearsal or two, she made him wait at table. Didn't he bang the things about: and when he brought a lady a dish, and she did not instantly attend, he gave her elbow a poke to attract attention: then she squeaked; and he grinned at her double absurdity in minding a touch, and not minding the real business of the table.

But his wrongs rankled in him. He vented antique phrases such as, "I want a change;" "This village is the last place the Almighty made," etc.

Then he was attacked with a moral disease: affected the company of soldiers. He spent his weekly salary carousing with the military, a class of men so brilliant that they are not expected to pay for their share of the drink; they contribute the anecdotes and the familiar appeals to Heaven: and is not that enough?

Present at many recitals, the heroes of which lost nothing by being their own historians, Dard imbibed a taste for military adventure. His very talk, which used to be so homely, began now to be tinselled with big swelling words of vanity imported from the army. I need hardly say these bombastical phrases did not elevate his general dialect: they lay fearfully distinct upon the surface, "like lumps of marl upon a barren soil, encumbering the ground they could not fertilize."

Jacintha took leave to remind him of an incident connected with warfare--wounds.

"Do you remember how you were down upon your luck when you did but cut your foot? Why, that is nothing in the army. They never go out to fight but some come back with arms off, and some with legs off and some with heads; and the rest don't come back at all: and how would you like that?"

This intrusion of statistics into warfare at first cooled Dard's impatience for the field. But presently the fighting half of his heart received an ally in one Sergeant La Croix (not a bad name for a military aspirant). This sergeant was at the village waiting to march with the new recruits to the Rhine. Sergeant La Croix was a man who, by force of eloquence, could make soldiering appear the most delightful as well as glorious of human pursuits. His tongue fired the inexperienced soul with a love of arms, as do the drums and trumpets and tramp of soldiers, and their bayonets glittering in the sun. He would have been worth his weight in fustian here, where we recruit by that and jargon; he was superfluous in France, where they recruited by force: but he was ornamental: and he set Dard and one or two more on fire. Indeed, so absorbing was his sense of military glory, that there was no room left in him for that mere verbal honor civilians call veracity.

To speak plainly, the sergeant was a fluent, fertile, interesting, sonorous, prompt, audacious liar: and such was his success, that Dard and one or two more became mere human fiction pipes--of comparatively small diameter--irrigating a rural district with false views of military life, derived from that inexhaustible reservoir, La Croix.

At last the long-threatened conscription was levied: every person fit to bear arms, and not coming under the allowed exceptions, drew a number: and at a certain hour the numbers corresponding to these were deposited in an urn, and one-third of them were drawn in presence of the authorities. Those men whose numbers were drawn had to go for soldiers. Jacintha awaited the result in great anxiety. She could not sit at home for it; so she went down the road to meet Dard, who had promised to come and tell her the result as soon as known. At last she saw him approaching in a disconsolate way. "O Dard! speak! are we undone? are you a dead man?" cried she. "Have they made a soldier of you?"

"No such luck: I shall die a man of all work," grunted Dard.

"And you are sorry? you unnatural little monster! you have no feeling for me, then."

"Oh, yes, I have; but glory is No. 1 with me now."

"How loud the bantams crow! You leave glory to fools that be six feet high."

"General Bonaparte isn't much higher than I am, and glory sits upon his brow. Why shouldn't glory sit upon my brow?"

"Because it would weigh you down, and smother you, you little fool." She added, "And think of me, that couldn't bear you to be killed at any price, glory or no glory."

Then, to appease her fears, Dard showed her his number, 99; and assured her he had seen the last number in the functionary's hand before he came away, and it was sixty something.

This ocular demonstration satisfied Jacintha; and she ordered Dard to help her draw the water.

"All right," said he, "there is no immortal glory to be picked up to-day, so I'll go in for odd jobs."

While they were at this job a voice was heard hallooing. Dard looked up, and there was a rigid military figure, with a tremendous mustache, peering about. Dard was overjoyed. It was his friend, his boon-companion. "Come here, old fellow," cried he, "ain't I glad to see you, that is all?" La Croix marched towards the pair. "What are you skulking here for, recruit ninety-nine?" said he, sternly, dropping the boon-companion in the sergeant; "the rest are on the road."

"The rest, old fellow! what do you mean? why, I was not drawn."

"Yes, you were."

"No, I wasn't."

"Thunder of war, but I say you were. Yours was the last number."

"That is an unlucky guess of yours, for I saw the last number. Look here," and he fumbled in his pocket, and produced his number.

La Croix instantly fished out a corresponding number.

"Well, and here you are; this was the last number drawn."

Dard burst out laughing.

"You goose!" said he, "that is sixty-six--look at it."

"Sixty-six!" roared the sergeant; "no more than yours is--they are both sixty-sixes when you play tricks with them, and turn them up like that; but they are both ninety-nines when you look at them fair."

Dard scratched his head.

"Come," said the corporal, briskly, "make up his bundle, girl, and let us be off; we have got our marching orders; going to the Rhine."

"And do you think that I will let him go?" screamed Jacintha. "No! I will say one word to Madame Raynal, and she will buy him a substitute directly."

Dard stopped her sullenly. "No! I have told all in the village that I would go the first chance: it is come, and I'll go. I won't stay to be laughed at about this too. If I was sure to be cut in pieces, I'd go. Give over blubbering, girl, and get us a bottle of the best wine, and while we are drinking it, the sergeant and I, you make up my bundle. I shall never do any good here."

Jacintha knew the obstinate toad. She did as she was bid, and soon the little bundle was ready, and the two men faced the wine; La Croix, radiant and bellicose; Dard, crestfallen but dogged (for there was a little bit of good stuff at the bottom of the creature); and Jacintha rocking herself, with her apron over her head.

"I'll give you a toast," said La Croix. "Here's gunpowder."

Jacintha promptly honored the toast with a flood of tears.

"Drop that, Jacintha," said Dard, angrily; "do you think that is encouraging? Sergeant, I told this poor girl all about glory before you came, but she was not ripe for it: say something to cheer her up, for I can't."

"I can," cried this trumpet of battle, emptying its glass. "Attention, young woman."

"Oh, dear! oh, dear! yes, sir."

"A French soldier is a man who carries France in his heart"--

"But if the cruel foreign soldiers kill him? Oh!"

"Why, in that case, he does not care a straw. Every man must die; horses likewise, and dogs, and donkeys, when they come to the end of their troubles; but dogs and donkeys and chaps in blouses can't die gloriously; as Dard may, if he has any luck at all: so, from this hour, if there was twice as little of him, be proud of him, for from this time he is a part of France and her renown. Come, recruit ninety-nine, shoulder your traps at duty's call, and let us go forth in form. Attention! Quick--march! Halt! is that the way I showed you to march? Didn't I tell you to start from the left? Now try again. Quick--march! left--right--left--right--left--right--Now you've--Got it--Drat ye,--Keep it--left--right--left--right--left-- right." And with no more ado the sergeant marched the little odd-job man to the wars.

Vive la France!

Edouard, the moment his temper cooled, became very sad. He longed to be friends again with Rose, but did not know how. His own pride held him back, and so did his fear that he had gone too far, and that his offended mistress would not listen to an offer of reconciliation from him. He sat down alone now to all his little meals. No sweet, mellow voices in his ear after the fatigues of the day. It was a dismal change in his life.

At last, one day, he received three lines from Josephine, requesting him to come and speak to her. He went over directly, full of vague hopes. He found her seated pale and languid in a small room on the ground floor.

"What has she been doing to you, dear?" began she kindly.

"Has she not told you, Madame Raynal?"

"No; she is refractory. She will tell me nothing, and that makes me fear she is the one in fault."

"Oh! if she does not accuse me, I am sure I will not accuse her. I dare say I am to blame; it is not her fault that I cannot make her love me."

"But you can. She does."

"Yes; but she loves others better, and she holds me out no hope it will ever be otherwise. On this one point how can I hope for your sympathy; unfortunately for me you are one of my rivals. She told me plainly she never could love me as she loves you."

"And you believed her?"

"I had good reason to believe her."

Josephine smiled sadly. "Dear Edouard," said she, "you must not attach so much importance to every word we say. Does Rose at her age know everything? Is she a prophet? Perhaps she really fancies she will always love her sister as she does now; but you are a man of sense; you ought to smile and let her talk. When you marry her you will take her to your own house; she will only see me now and then; she will have you and your affection always present. Each day some new tie between you and her. You two will share every joy, every sorrow. Your children playing at your feet, and reflecting the features of both parents, will make you one. Your hearts will melt together in that blessed union which raises earth so near to heaven; and then you will wonder you could ever be jealous of poor Josephine, who must never hope--ah, me!"

Edouard, wrapped up in himself, mistook Josephine's emotion at the picture she had drawn of conjugal love. He soothed her, and vowed upon his honor he never would separate Rose from her.

"Madame Raynal," said he, "you are an angel, and I am a fiend. Jealousy must be the meanest of all sentiments. I never will be jealous again, above all, of you, sweet angel. Why, you are my sister as well as hers, and she has a right to love you, for I love you myself."

"You make me very happy when you talk so," sighed Josephine. "Peace is made?"

"Never again to be broken. I will go and ask her pardon. What is the matter now?"

For Jacintha was cackling very loud, and dismissing with ignominy two beggars, male and female.

She was industry personified, and had no sympathy with mendicity. In vain the couple protested, Heaven knows with what truth, that they were not beggars, but mechanics out of work. "March! tramp!" was Jacintha's least word. She added, giving the rein to her imagination, "I'll loose the dog." The man moved away, the woman turned appealingly to Edouard. He and Josephine came towards the group. She had got a sort of large hood, and in that hood she carried an infant on her shoulders. Josephine inspected it. "It looks sickly, poor little thing," said she.

"What can you expect, young lady?" said the woman. "Its mother had to rise and go about when she ought to have been in her bed, and now she has not enough to give it."

"Oh, dear!" cried Josephine. "Jacintha, give them some food and a nice bottle of wine."

"That I will," cried Jacintha, changing her tone with courtier-like alacrity. "I did not see she was nursing."

Josephine put a franc into the infant's hand; the little fingers closed on it with that instinct of appropriation, which is our first and often our last sentiment. Josephine smiled lovingly on the child, and the child seeing that gave a small crow.

"Bless it," said Josephine, and thereupon her lovely head reared itself like a snake's, and then darted down on the child; and the young noble kissed the beggar's brat as if she would eat it.

This won the mother's heart more than even the gifts.

"Blessings on you, my lady!" she cried. "I pray the Lord not to forget this when a woman's trouble comes on you in your turn! It is a small child, mademoiselle, but it is not an unhealthy one. See." Inspection was offered, and eagerly accepted.

Edouard stood looking on at some distance in amazement, mingled with disgust.

"Ugh!" said he, when she rejoined him, "how could you kiss that nasty little brat?"

"Dear Edouard, don't speak so of a poor little innocent. Who would pity them if we women did not? It had lovely eyes."

"Like saucers."

"Yes."

"It is no compliment when you are affectionate to anybody; you overflow with benevolence on all creation, like the rose which sheds its perfume on the first-comer."

"If he is not going to be jealous of me next," whined Josephine.

She took him to Rose, and she said, "There, whenever good friends quarrel, it is understood they were both in the wrong. Bygones are to be bygones; and when your time comes round to quarrel again, please consult me first, since it is me you will afflict." She left them together, and went and tapped timidly at the doctor's study.

Aubertin received her with none of that reserve she had seen in him. He appeared both surprised and pleased at her visit to his little sanctum. He even showed an emotion Josephine was at a loss to account for. But that wore off during the conversation, and, indeed, gave place to a sort of coldness.

"Dear friend," said she, "I come to consult you about Rose and Edouard." She then told him what had happened, and hinted at Edouard's one fault. The doctor smiled. "It is curious. You have come to draw my attention to a point on which it has been fixed for some days past. I am preparing a cure for the two young fools; a severe remedy, but in their case a sure one."

He then showed her a deed, wherein he had settled sixty thousand francs on Rose and her children. "Edouard," said he, "has a good place. He is active and rising, and with my sixty thousand francs, and a little purse of ten thousand more for furniture and nonsense, they can marry next week, if they like. Yes, marriage is a sovereign medicine for both of these patients. She does not love him quite enough. Cure: marriage. He loves her a little too much. Cure: marriage."

"O doctor!"

"Can't help it. I did not make men and women. We must take human nature as we find it, and thank God for it on the whole. Have you nothing else to confide to me?"

"No, doctor."

"Are you sure?"

"No, dear friend. But this is very near my heart," faltered Josephine.

The doctor sighed; then said gently, "They shall be happy: as happy as you wish them."

Meantime, in another room, a reconciliation scene was taking place, and the mutual concessions of two impetuous but generous spirits.

The baroness noticed the change in Josephine's appearance.

She asked Rose what could be the matter.

"Some passing ailment," was the reply.

"Passing? She has been so, on and off, a long time. She makes me very anxious."

Rose made light of it to her mother, but in her own heart she grew more and more anxious day by day. She held secret conferences with Jacintha; that sagacious personage had a plan to wake Josephine from her deathly languor, and even soothe her nerves, and check those pitiable fits of nervous irritation to which she had become subject. Unfortunately, Jacintha's plan was so difficult and so dangerous, that at first even the courageous Rose recoiled from it; but there are dangers that seem to diminish when you look them long in the face.

The whole party was seated in the tapestried room: Jacintha was there, sewing a pair of sheets, at a respectful distance from the gentlefolks, absorbed in her work; but with both ears on full cock.

The doctor, holding his glasses to his eye, had just begun to read out the Moniteur.

The baroness sat close to him, Edouard opposite; and the young ladies each in her corner of a large luxurious sofa, at some little distance.

"'The Austrians left seventy cannon, eight thousand men, and three colors upon the field. Army of the North: General Menard defeated the enemy after a severe engagement, taking thirteen field-pieces and a quantity of ammunition.'"

The baroness made a narrow-minded remark. "That is always the way with these journals," said she. "Austrians! Prussians! when it's Egypt one wants to hear about."--"No, not a word about Egypt," said the doctor; "but there is a whole column about the Rhine, where Colonel Dujardin is--and Dard. If I was dictator, the first nuisance I would put down is small type." He then spelled out a sanguinary engagement: "eight thousand of the enemy killed. We have some losses to lament. Colonel Dujardin"--

"Only wounded, I hope," said the baroness.

The doctor went coolly on. "At the head of the 24th brigade made a brilliant charge on the enemy's flank, that is described in the general order as having decided the fate of the battle."

"How badly you do read," said the old lady, sharply. "I thought he was gone; instead of that he has covered himself with glory; but it is all our doing, is it not, young ladies? We saved his life."

"We saved it amongst us, madame."

"What is the matter, Rose?" said Edouard.

"Nothing: give me the salts, quick."

She only passed them, as it were, under her own nostrils; then held them to Josephine, who was now observed to be trembling all over. Rose contrived to make it appear that this was mere sympathy on Josephine's part.

"Don't be silly, girls," cried the baroness, cheerfully; "there is nobody killed that we care about."

Dr. Aubertin read the rest to himself.

Edouard fell into a gloomy silence and tortured himself about Camille, and Rose's anxiety and agitation.

By and by the new servant brought in a letter. It was the long-expected one from Egypt.

"Here is something better than salts for you. A long letter, Josephine, and all in his own hand; so he is safe, thank Heaven! I was beginning to be uneasy again. You frightened me for that poor Camille: but this is worth a dozen Camilles; this is my son; I would give my old life for him."--"My dear Mother--('Bless him!'), my dear wife, and my dear sister--('Well! you sit there like two rocks!')-- We have just gained a battle--fifty colors. ('What do you think of that?') All the enemy's baggage and ammunition are in our hands. ('This is something like a battle, this one.') Also the Pasha of Natolie. ('Ah! the Pasha of Natolie; an important personage, no doubt, though I never had the honor of hearing of him. Do you hear?--you on the sofa. My son has captured the Pasha of Natolie. He is as brave as Caesar.') But this success is not one of those that lead to important results ('Never mind, a victory is a victory'), and I should not wonder if Bonaparte was to dash home any day. If so, I shall go with him, and perhaps spend a whole day with you, on my way to the Rhine."

At this prospect a ghastly look passed quick as lightning between Rose and Josephine.

The baroness beckoned Josephine to come close to her, and read her what followed in a lower tone of voice.

"Tell my wife I love her more and more every day. I don't expect as much from her, but she will make me very happy if she can make shift to like me as well as her family do."--"No danger! What husband deserves to be loved as he does? I long for his return, that his wife, his mother, and his sister may all combine to teach this poor soldier what happiness means. We owe him everything, Josephine, and if we did not love him, and make him happy, we should be monsters; now should we not?"

Josephine stammered an assent.

"Now you may read his letter: Jacintha and all," said the baroness graciously.

The letter circulated. Meantime, the baroness conversed with Aubertin in quite an undertone.

"My friend, look at Josephine. That girl is ill, or else she is going to be ill."

"Neither the one nor the other, madame," said Aubertin, looking her coolly in the face.

"But I say she is. Is a doctor's eye keener than a mother's?"

"Considerably," replied the doctor with cool and enviable effrontery.

The baroness rose. "Now, children, for our evening walk. We shall enjoy it now."

"I trust you may: but for all that I must forbid the evening air to one of the party--to Madame Raynal."

The baroness came to him and whispered, "That is right. Thank you. See what is the matter with her, and tell me." And she carried off the rest of the party.

At the same time Jacintha asked permission to pass the rest of the evening with her relations in the village. But why that swift, quivering glance of intelligence between Jacintha and Rose de Beaurepaire when the baroness said, "Yes, certainly"?

Time will show.

Josephine and the doctor were left alone. Now Josephine had noticed the old people whisper and her mother glance her way, and the whole woman was on her guard. She assumed a languid complacency, and by way of shield, if necessary, took some work, and bent her eyes and apparently her attention on it.

The doctor was silent and ill at ease.

She saw he had something weighty on his mind. "The air would have done me no harm," said she.

"Neither will a few words with me."

"Oh, no, dear friend. Only I think I should have liked a little walk this evening."

"Josephine," said the doctor quietly, "when you were a child I saved your life."

"I have often heard my mother speak of it. I was choked by the croup, and you had the courage to lance my windpipe."

"Had I?" said the doctor, with a smile. He added gravely, "It seems then that to be cruel is sometimes kindness. It is the nature of men to love those whose life they save."

"And they love you."

"Well, our affection is not perfect. I don't know which is most to blame, but after all these years I have failed to inspire you with confidence." The doctor's voice was sad, and Josephine's bosom panted.

"Pray do not say so," she cried. "I would trust you with my life."

"But not with your secret."

"My secret! What secret? I have no secrets."

"Josephine, you have now for full twelve months suffered in body and mind, yet you have never come to me for counsel, for comfort, for an old man's experience and advice, nor even for medical aid."

"But, dear friend, I assure you"--

"We do not deceive our friend. We cannot deceive our doctor."

Josephine trembled, but defended herself after the manner of her sex. "Dear doctor," said she, "I love you all the better for this. Your regard for me has for once blinded your science. I am not so robust as you have known me, but there is nothing serious the matter with me. Let us talk of something else. Besides, it is not interesting to talk about one's self."

"Very well; since there is nothing serious or interesting in your case, we will talk about something that is both serious and interesting."

"With all my heart;" and she smiled with a sense of relief.

But the doctor leaned over the table to her, and said in a cautious and most emphatic whisper, "We will talk about your child."

The work dropped from Josephine's hands: she turned her face wildly on Aubertin, and faltered out, "M--my child?"

"My words are plain," replied he gravely. "Your child."

When the doctor repeated these words, when Josephine looking in his face saw he spoke from knowledge, however acquired, and not from guess, she glided down slowly off the sofa and clasped his knees as he stood before her, and hid her face in an agony of shame and terror on his knees.

"Forgive me," she sobbed. "Pray do not expose me! Do not destroy me."

"Unhappy young lady," said he, "did you think you had deceived me, or that you are fit to deceive any but the blind? Your face, your anguish after Colonel Dujardin's departure, your languor, and then your sudden robustness, your appetite, your caprices, your strange sojourn at Frejus, your changed looks and loss of health on your return! Josephine, your old friend has passed many an hour thinking of you, divining your folly, following your trouble step by step. Yet you never invited him to aid you."

Josephine faltered out a lame excuse. If she had revered him less she could have borne to confess to him. She added it would be a relief to her to confide in him.

"Then tell me all," said he.

She consented almost eagerly, and told him--nearly all. The old man was deeply affected. He murmured in a broken voice, "Your story is the story of your sex, self-sacrifice, first to your mother, then to Camille, now to your husband."

"And he is well worthy of any sacrifice I can make," said Josephine. "But oh, how hard it is to live!"

"I hope to make it less hard to you ere long," said the doctor quietly. He then congratulated himself on having forced Josephine to confide in him. "For," said he, "you never needed an experienced friend more than at this moment. Your mother will not always be so blind as of late. Edouard is suspicious. Jacintha is a shrewd young woman, and very inquisitive."

Josephine was not at the end of her concealments: she was ashamed to let him know she had made a confidant of Jacintha and not of him. She held her peace.

"Then," continued Aubertin, "there is the terrible chance of Raynal's return. But ere I take on me to advise you, what are your own plans?"

"I don't know," said Josephine helplessly.

"You--don't--know!" cried the doctor, looking at her in utter amazement.

"It is the answer of a mad woman, is it not? Doctor, I am little better. My foot has slipped on the edge of a precipice. I close my eyes, and let myself glide down it. What will become of me?"

"All shall be well," said Aubertin, "provided you do not still love that man."

Josephine did not immediately reply: her thoughts turned inwards. The good doctor was proceeding to congratulate her on being cured of a fatal passion, when she stopped him with wonder in her face. "Not love him! How can I help loving him? I was his betrothed. I wronged him in my thoughts. War, prison, anguish, could not kill him; he loved me so. He struggled bleeding to my feet; and could I let him die, after all? Could I be crueller than prison, and torture, and despair?"

The doctor sighed deeply; but, arming himself with the necessary resolution, he sternly replied, "A woman of your name cannot vacillate between love and honor; such vacillations have but one end. I will not let you drift a moral wreck between passion and virtue; and that is what it will come to if you hesitate now."

"Hesitate! Who can say I have hesitated where my honor was concerned? You can read our bodies then, but not our hearts. What! you see me so pale, forlorn, and dead, and that does not tell you I have bid Camille farewell forever? That we might be safer still I have not even told him he is a father: was ever woman so cruel as I am? I have written him but one letter, and in that I must deceive him. I told him I thought I might one day be happy, if I could hear that he did not give way to despair. I told him we must never meet again in this world. So now come what will: show me my duty and I will do it. This endless deceit burns my heart. Shall I tell my husband? It will be but one pang more, one blush more for me. But my mother!" and, thus appealed to, Dr. Aubertin felt, for the first time, all the difficulty of the situation he had undertaken to cure. He hesitated, he was embarrassed.

"Ah," said Josephine, "you see." Then, after a short silence, she said despairingly, "This is my only hope: that poor Raynal will be long absent, and that ere he returns mamma will lie safe from sorrow and shame in the little chapel. Doctor, when a woman of my age forms such wishes as these, I think you might pity her, and forgive her ill-treatment of you, for she cannot be very happy. Ah me! ah me! ah me!"

"Courage, poor soul! All is now in my hands, and I will save you," said the doctor, his voice trembling in spite of him. "Guilt lies in the intention. A more innocent woman than you does not breathe. Two courses lay open to you: to leave this house with Camille Dujardin, or to dismiss him, and live for your hard duty till it shall please Heaven to make that duty easy (no middle course was tenable for a day); of these two paths you chose the right one, and, having chosen, I really think you are not called on to reveal your misfortune, and make those unhappy to whose happiness you have sacrificed your own for years to come."

"Forever," said Josephine quietly.

"The young use that word lightly. The old have almost ceased to use it. They have seen how few earthly things can conquer time."

He resumed, "You think only of others, Josephine, but I shall think of you as well. I shall not allow your life to be wasted in a needless struggle against nature." Then turning to Rose, who had glided into the room, and stood amazed, "Her griefs were as many before her child was born, yet her health stood firm. Why? because nature was on her side. Now she is sinking into the grave. Why? because she is defying nature. Nature intended her to be pressing her child to her bosom day and night; instead of that, a peasant woman at Frejus nurses the child, and the mother pines at Beaurepaire."

At this, Josephine leaned her face on her hands on the doctor's shoulder. In this attitude she murmured to him, "I have never seen him since I left Frejus." Dr. Aubertin sighed for her. Emboldened by this, she announced her intention of going to Frejus the very next day to see her little Henri. But to this Dr. Aubertin demurred. "What, another journey to Frejus?" said he, "when the first has already roused Edouard's suspicions; I can never consent to that."

Then Josephine surprised them both. She dropped her coaxing voice and pecked the doctor like an irritated pigeon. "Take care," said she, "don't be too cruel to me. You see I am obedient, resigned. I have given up all I lived for: but if I am never to have my little boy's arms round me to console me, then--why torment me any longer? Why not say to me, 'Josephine, you have offended Heaven; pray for pardon, and die'?"

Then the doctor was angry in his turn. "Oh, go then," said he, "go to Frejus; you will have Edouard Riviere for a companion this time. Your first visit roused his suspicions. So before you go tell your mother all; for since she is sure to find it out, she had better hear it from you than from another."

"Doctor, have pity on me," said Josephine.

"You have no heart," said Rose. "She shall see him though, in spite of you."

"Oh, yes! he has a heart," said Josephine: "he is my best friend. He will let me see my boy."

All this, and the tearful eyes and coaxing yet trembling voice, was hard to resist. But Aubertin saw clearly, and stood firm. He put his handkerchief to his eyes a moment: then took the pining young mother's hand. "And, do you think," said he, "I do not pity you and love your boy? Ah! he will never want a father whilst I live; and from this moment he is under my care. I will go to see him; I will bring you news, and all in good time; I will place him where you shall visit him without imprudence; but, for the present, trust a wiser head than yours or Rose's; and give me your sacred promise not to go to Frejus."

Weighed down by his good-sense and kindness, Josephine resisted no longer in words. She just lifted her hands in despair and began to cry. It was so piteous, Aubertin was ready to yield in turn, and consent to any imprudence, when he met with an unexpected ally.

"Promise," said Rose, doggedly.

Josephine looked at her calmly through her tears.

"Promise, dear," repeated Rose, and this time with an intonation so fine that it attracted Josephine's notice, but not the doctor's. It was followed by a glance equally subtle.

"I promise," said Josephine, with her eye fixed inquiringly on her sister.

For once she could not make the telegraph out: but she could see it was playing, and that was enough. She did what Rose bid her; she promised not to go to Frejus without leave.

Finding her so submissive all of a sudden, he went on to suggest that she must not go kissing every child she saw. "Edouard tells me he saw you kissing a beggar's brat. The young rogue was going to quiz you about it at the dinner-table; luckily, he told me his intention, and I would not let him. I said the baroness would be annoyed with you for descending from your dignity--and exposing a noble family to fleas--hush! here he is."

"Tiresome!" muttered Rose, "just when"--

Edouard came forward with a half-vexed face.

However, he turned it off into play. "What have you been saying to her, monsieur, to interest her so? Give me a leaf out of your book. I need it."

The doctor was taken aback for a moment, but at last he said slyly, "I have been proposing to her to name the day. She says she must consult you before she decides that."

"Oh, you wicked doctor!--and consult him of all people!"

"So be off, both of you, and don't reappear before me till it is settled."

Edouard's eyes sparkled. Rose went out with a face as red as fire.

It was a balmy evening. Edouard was to leave them for a week the next day. They were alone: Rose was determined he should go away quite happy. Everything was in Edouard's favor: he pleaded his cause warmly: she listened tenderly: this happy evening her piquancy and archness seemed to dissolve into tenderness as she and Edouard walked hand in hand under the moon: a tenderness all the more heavenly to her devoted lover, that she was not one of those angels who cloy a man by invariable sweetness.

For a little while she forgot everything but her companion. In that soft hour he won her to name the day, after her fashion.

"Josephine goes to Paris with the doctor in about three weeks," murmured she.

"And you will stay behind, all alone?"

"Alone? that shall depend on you, monsieur."

On this Edouard caught her for the first time in his arms.

She made a faint resistance.

"Seal me that promise, sweet one!"

"No! no!--there!"

He pressed a delicious first kiss upon two velvet lips that in their innocence scarcely shunned the sweet attack.

For all that, the bond was no sooner sealed after this fashion, than the lady's cheek began to burn.

"Suppose we go in now?" said she, dryly.

"Ah, not yet."

"It is late, dear Edouard."

And with these words something returned to her mind with its full force: something that Edouard had actually made her forget. She wanted to get rid of him now.

"Edouard," said she, "can you get up early in the morning? If you can, meet me here to-morrow before any of them are up; then we can talk without interruption."

Edouard was delighted.

"Eight o'clock?"

"Sooner if you like. Mamma bade me come and read to her in her room to-night. She will be waiting for me. Is it not tiresome?"

"Yes, it is."

"Well, we must not mind that, dear; in three weeks' time we are to have too much of one another, you know, instead of too little."

"Too much! I shall never have enough of you. I shall hate the night which will rob me of the sight of you for so many hours in the twenty-four."

"If you can't see me, perhaps you may hear me; my tongue runs by night as well as by day."

"Well, that is a comfort," said Edouard, gravely. "Yes, little quizzer, I would rather hear you scold than an angel sing. Judge, then, what music it is when you say you love me!"

"I love you, Edouard."

Edouard kissed her hand warmly, and then looked irresolutely at her face.

"No, no!" said she, laughing and blushing. "How rude you are. Next time we meet."

"That is a bargain. But I won't go till you say you love me again.

"Edouard, don't be silly. I am ashamed of saying the same thing so often--I won't say it any more. What is the use? You know I love you. There, I have said it: how stupid!"

"Adieu, then, my wife that is to be."

"Adieu! dear Edouard."

"My hus--go on--my hus--"

"My huswife that shall be."

Then they walked very slowly towards the house, and once more Rose left quizzing, and was all tenderness.

"Will you not come in, and bid them 'good-night'?"

"No, my own; I am in heaven. Common faces--common voices would bring me down to earth. Let me be alone;--your sweet words ringing in my ear. I will dilute you with nothing meaner than the stars. See how bright they shine in heaven; but not so bright as you shine in my heart."

"Dear Edouard, you flatter me, you spoil me. Alas! why am I not more worthy of your love?"

"More worthy! How can that be?"

Rose sighed.

"But I will atone for all. I will make you a better--(here she substituted a full stop for a substantive)--than you expect. You will see else."

She lingered at the door: a proof that if Edouard, at that particular moment, had seized another kiss, there would have been no very violent opposition or offence.

But he was not so impudent as some. He had been told to wait till the next meeting for that. He prayed Heaven to bless her, and so the affianced lovers parted for the night.

It was about nine o'clock. Edouard, instead of returning to his lodgings, started down towards the town, to conclude a bargain with the innkeeper for an English mare he was in treaty for. He wanted her for to-morrow's work; so that decided him to make the purchase. In purchases, as in other matters, a feather turns the balanced scale. He sauntered leisurely down. It was a very clear night; the full moon and the stars shining silvery and vivid. Edouard's heart swelled with joy. He was loved after all, deeply loved; and in three short weeks he was actually to be Rose's husband: her lord and master. How like a heavenly dream it all seemed--the first hopeless courtship, and now the wedding fixed! But it was no dream; he felt her soft words still murmur music at his heart, and the shadow of her velvet lips slept upon his own.

He had strolled about a league when he heard the ring of a horse's hoofs coming towards him, accompanied by a clanking noise; it came nearer and nearer, till it reached a hill that lay a little ahead of Edouard; then the sounds ceased; the cavalier was walking his horse up the hill.

Presently, as if they had started from the earth, up popped between Edouard and the sky, first a cocked hat that seemed in that light to be cut with a razor out of flint; then the wearer, phosphorescent here and there; so brightly the keen moonlight played on his epaulets and steel scabbard. A step or two nearer, and Edouard gave a great shout; it was Colonel Raynal.

After the first warm greeting, and questions and answers, Raynal told him he was on his way to the Rhine with despatches.

"To the Rhine?"

I am allowed six days to get there. I made a calculation, and found I could give Beaurepaire half a day. I shall have to make up for it by hard riding. You know me; always in a hurry. It is Bonaparte's fault this time. He is always in a hurry too."

"Why, colonel," said Edouard, "let us make haste then. Mind they go early to rest at the chateau."

"But you are not coming my way, youngster?"

"Not coming your way? Yes, but I am. Yours is a face I don't see every day, colonel; besides I would not miss their faces, especially the baroness's and Madame Raynal's, at sight of you; and, besides,"-- and the young gentleman chuckled to himself, and thought of Rose's words, "the next time we meet;" well, this will be the next time. "May I jump up behind?"

Colonel Raynal nodded assent. Edouard took a run, and lighted like a monkey on the horse's crupper. He pranced and kicked at this unexpected addition; but the spur being promptly applied to his flanks, he bounded off with a snort that betrayed more astonishment than satisfaction, and away they cantered to Beaurepaire, without drawing rein.

"There," said Edouard, "I was afraid they would be gone to bed; and they are. The very house seems asleep--fancy--at half-past ten."

"That is a pity," said Raynal, "for this chateau is the stronghold of etiquette. They will be two hours dressing before they will come out and shake hands. I must put my horse into the stable. Go you and give the alarm."

"I will, colonel. Stop, first let me see whether none of them are up, after all."

And Edouard walked round the chateau, and soon discovered a light at one window, the window of the tapestried room. Running round the other way he came slap upon another light: this one was nearer the ground. A narrow but massive door, which he had always seen not only locked but screwed up, was wide open; and through the aperture the light of a candle streamed out and met the moonlight streaming in.

"Hallo!" cried Edouard.

He stopped, turned, and looked in.

"Hallo!" he cried again much louder.

A young woman was sleeping with her feet in the silvery moonlight, and her head in the orange-colored blaze of a flat candle, which rested on the next step above of a fine stone staircase, whose existence was now first revealed to the inquisitive Edouard.

Coming plump upon all this so unexpectedly, he quite started.

"Why, Jacintha!"

He touched her on the shoulder to wake her. No. Jacintha was sleeping as only tired domestics can sleep. He might have taken the candle and burnt her gown off her back. She had found a step that fitted into the small of her back, and another that supported her head, and there she was fast as a door.

At this moment Raynal's voice was heard calling him.

"There is a light in that bedroom."

"It is not a bedroom, colonel; it is our sitting-room now. We shall find them all there, or at least the young ladies; and perhaps the doctor. The baroness goes to bed early. Meantime I can show you one of our dramatis personae, and an important one too. She rules the roost."

He took him mysteriously and showed him Jacintha.

Moonlight by itself seems white, and candlelight by itself seems yellow; but when the two come into close contrast at night, candle turns a reddish flame, and moonlight a bluish gleam.

So Jacintha, with her shoes in this celestial sheen, and her face in that demoniacal glare, was enough to knock the gazer's eye out.

"Make a good sentinel--this one," said Raynal--"an outlying picket for instance, on rough ground, in front of the enemy's riflemen."

"Ha! ha! colonel! Let us see where this staircase leads. I have an idea it will prove a short cut."

"Where to?"

"To the saloon, or somewhere, or else to some of Jacintha's haunts. Serve her right for going to sleep at the mouth of her den."

"Forward then--no, halt! Suppose it leads to the bedrooms? Mind this is a thundering place for ceremony. We shall get drummed out of the barracks if we don't mind our etiquette."

At this they hesitated; and Edouard himself thought, on the whole, it would be better to go and hammer at the front door.

Now while they hesitated, a soft delicious harmony of female voices suddenly rose, and seemed to come and run round the walls. The men looked at one another in astonishment; for the effect was magical. The staircase being enclosed on all sides with stone walls and floored with stone, they were like flies inside a violoncello; the voices rang above, below, and on every side of the vibrating walls. In some epochs spirits as hardy as Raynal's, and wits as quick as Riviere's, would have fled then and there to the nearest public, and told over cups how they had heard the dames of Beaurepaire, long since dead, holding their revel, and the conscious old devil's nest of a chateau quivering to the ghostly strains.

But this was an incredulous age. They listened, and listened, and decided the sounds came from up-stairs.

"Let us mount, and surprise these singing witches," said Edouard.

"Surprise them! what for? It is not the enemy--for once. What is the good of surprising our friends?"

Storming parties and surprises were no novelty and therefore no treat to Raynal.

"It will be so delightful to see their faces at first sight of you. O colonel, for my sake! Don't spoil it by going tamely in at the front door, after coming at night from Egypt for half an hour."

Raynal grumbled something about its being a childish trick; but to please Edouard consented at last; only stipulated for a light: "or else," said he, "we shall surprise ourselves instead with a broken neck, going over ground we don't know to surprise the natives--our skirmishers got nicked that way now and then in Egypt."

"Yes, colonel, I will go first with Jacintha's candle." Edouard mounted the stairs on tiptoe. Raynal followed. The solid stone steps did not prate. The men had mounted a considerable way, when puff a blast of wind came through a hole, and out went Edouard's candle. He turned sharply round to Raynal. "Peste!" said he in a vicious whisper. But the other laid his hand on his shoulder and whispered, "Look to the front." He looked, and, his own candle being out, saw a glimmer on ahead. He crept towards it. It was a taper shooting a feeble light across a small aperture. They caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a small apartment. Yet Edouard recognized the carpet of the tapestried room--which was a very large room. Creeping a yard nearer, he discovered that it was the tapestried room, and that what had seemed the further wall was only the screen, behind which were lights, and two women singing a duet.

He whispered to Raynal, "It is the tapestried room."

"Is it a sitting-room?" whispered Raynal.

"Yes! yes! Mind and not knock your foot against the wood."

And Raynal went softly up and put his foot quietly through the aperture, which he now saw was made by a panel drawn back close to the ground; and stood in the tapestried chamber. The carpet was thick; the voices favored the stealthy advance; the floor of the old house was like a rock; and Edouard put his face through the aperture, glowing all over with anticipation of the little scream of joy that would welcome his friend dropping in so nice and suddenly from Egypt.

The feeling was rendered still more piquant by a sharp curiosity that had been growing on him for some minutes past. For why was this passage opened to-night?--he had never seen it opened before. And why was Jacintha lying sentinel at the foot of the stairs?

But this was not all. Now that they were in the room both men became conscious of another sound besides the ladies' voices--a very peculiar sound. It also came from behind the screen. They both heard it, and showed, by the puzzled looks they cast at one another, that neither could make out what on earth it was. It consisted of a succession of little rustles, followed by little thumps on the floor.

But what was curious, too, this rustle, thump--rustle, thump--fell exactly into the time of the music; so that, clearly, either the rustle thump was being played to the tune, or the tune sung to the rustle thump.

This last touch of mystery inflamed Edouard's impatience beyond bearing: he pointed eagerly and merrily to the corner of the screen. Raynal obeyed, and stepped very slowly and cautiously towards it.

Rustle, thump! rustle, thump! rustle, thump! with the rhythm of harmonious voices.

Edouard got his head and foot into the room without taking his eye off Raynal.

Rustle, thump! rustle, thump! rustle, thump!

Raynal was now at the screen, and quietly put his head round it, and his hand upon it.

Edouard was bursting with expectation.

No result. What is this? Don't they see him? Why does he not speak to them? He seems transfixed.

Rustle, thump! rustle, thump; accompanied now for a few notes by one voice only, Rose's.

Suddenly there burst a shriek from Josephine, so loud, so fearful, that it made even Raynal stagger back a step, the screen in his hand.

Then another scream of terror and anguish from Rose. Then a fainter cry, and the heavy helpless fall of a human body.

Raynal sprang forward whirling the screen to the earth in terrible agitation, and Edouard bounded over it as it fell at his feet. He did not take a second step. The scene that caught his eye stupefied and paralyzed him in full career, and froze him to the spot with amazement and strange misgivings.

To return for a moment to Rose. She parted from Edouard, and went in at the front door: but the next moment she opened it softly and watched her lover unseen. "Dear Edouard!" she murmured: and then she thought, "how sad it is that I must deceive him, even to-night: must make up an excuse to get him from me, when we were so happy together. Ah! he little knows how I shall welcome our wedding-day. When once I can see my poor martyr on the road to peace and content under the good doctor's care. And oh! the happiness of having no more secrets from him I love! Dear Edouard! when once we are married, I never, never, will have a secret from you again--I swear it."

As a comment on these words she now stepped cautiously out, and peered in every direction.

"St--st!" she whispered. No answer came to this signal.

Rose returned into the house and bolted the door inside. She went up to the tapestried room, and found the doctor in the act of wishing Josephine good-night. The baroness, fatigued a little by her walk, had mounted no higher than her own bedroom, which was on the first floor just under the tapestried room. Rose followed the doctor out. "Dear friend, one word. Josephine talked of telling Raynal. You have not encouraged her to do that?"

"Certainly not, while he is in Egypt."

"Still less on his return. Doctor, you don't know that man. Josephine does not know him. But I do. He would kill her if he knew. He would kill her that minute. He would not wait: he would not listen to excuses: he is a man of iron. Or if he spared her he would kill Camille: and that would destroy her by the cruellest of all deaths! My friend, I am a wicked, miserable girl. I am the cause of all this misery!"

She then told Aubertin all about the anonymous letter, and what Raynal had said to her in consequence.

"He never would have married her had he known she loved another. He asked me was it so. I told him a falsehood. At least I equivocated, and to equivocate with one so loyal and simple was to deceive him. I am the only sinner: that sweet angel is the only sufferer. Is this the justice of Heaven? Doctor, my remorse is great. No one knows what I feel when I look at my work. Edouard thinks I love her so much better than I do him. He is wrong: it is not love only, it is pity: it is remorse for the sorrow I have brought on her, and the wrong I have done poor Raynal."

The high-spirited girl was greatly agitated: and Aubertin, though he did not acquit her of all blame, soothed her, and made excuses for her.

"We must not always judge by results," said he. "Things turned unfortunately. You did for the best. I forgive you for one. That is, I will forgive you if you promise not to act again without my advice."

"Oh, never! never!"

"And, above all, no imprudence about that child. In three little weeks they will be together without risk of discovery. Well, you don't answer me."

Rose's blood turned cold. "Dear friend," she stammered, "I quite agree with you."

"Promise, then."

"Not to let Josephine go to Frejus?" said Rose hastily. "Oh, yes! I promise."

"You are a good girl," said Aubertin. "You have a will of your own. But you can submit to age and experience." The doctor then kissed her, and bade her farewell.

"I leave for Paris at six in the morning," he said. "I will not try your patience or hers unnecessarily. Perhaps it will not be three weeks ere she sees her child under her friend's roof."

The moment Rose was alone, she sat down and sighed bitterly. "There is no end to it," she sobbed despairingly. "It is like a spider's web: every struggle to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to bind me. And to-night I thought to be so happy; instead of that, he has left me scarce the heart to do what I have to do."

She went back to the room, opened a window, and put out a white handkerchief, then closed the window down on it.

Then she went to Josephine's bedroom-door: it opened on the tapestried room.

"Josephine," she cried, "don't go to bed just yet."

"No, love. What are you doing? I want to talk to you. Why did you say promise? and what did you mean by looking at me so? Shall I come out to you?"

"Not just yet," said Rose; she then glided into the corridor, and passed her mother's room and the doctor's, and listened to see if all was quiet. While she was gone Josephine opened her door; but not seeing Rose in the sitting-room, retired again.

Rose returned softly, and sat down with her head in her hand, in a calm attitude belied by her glancing eye, and the quick tapping of her other hand upon the table.

Presently she raised her head quickly; a sound had reached her ear,-- a sound so slight that none but a high-strung ear could have caught it. It was like a mouse giving a single scratch against a stone wall.

Rose coughed slightly.

On this a clearer sound was heard, as of a person scratching wood with the finger-nail. Rose darted to the side of the room, pressed against the wall, and at the same time put her other hand against the rim of one of the panels and pushed it laterally; it yielded, and at the opening stood Jacintha in her cloak and bonnet.

"Yes," said Jacintha, "under my cloak--look!"

"Ah! you found the things on the steps?"

"Yes! I nearly tumbled over them. Have you locked that door?"

"No, but I will." And Rose glided to the door and locked it. Then she put the screen up between Josephine's room and the open panel: then she and Jacintha were wonderfully busy on the other side the screen, but presently Rose said, "This is imprudent; you must go down to the foot of the stairs and wait till I call you."

Jacintha pleaded hard against this arrangement, and represented that there was no earthly chance of any one coming to that part of the chateau.

"No matter; I will be guarded on every side."

"Mustn't I stop and just see her happy for once?"

"No, my poor Jacintha, you must hear it from my lips."

Jacintha retired to keep watch as she was bid. Rose went to Josephine's room, and threw her arms round her neck and kissed her vehemently. Josephine returned her embrace, then held her out at arm's length and looked at her.

"Your eyes are red, yet your little face is full of joy. There, you smile."

"I can't help that; I am so happy."

"I am glad of it. Are you coming to bed?"

"Not yet. I invite you to take a little walk with me first. Come!" and she led the way slowly, looking back with infinite archness and tenderness.

"You almost frighten me," said Josephine; "it is not like you to be all joy when I am sad. Three whole weeks more!"

"That is it. Why are you sad? because the doctor would not let you go to Frejus. And why am I not sad? because I had already thought of a way to let you see Edouard without going so far."

"Rose! O Rose! O Rose!"

"This way--come!" and she smiled and beckoned with her finger, while Josephine followed like one under a spell, her bosom heaving, her eye glancing on every side, hoping some strange joy, yet scarce daring to hope.

Rose drew back the screen, and there was a sweet little berceau that had once been Josephine's own, and in it, sunk deep in snow-white lawn, was a sleeping child, that lay there looking as a rose might look could it fall upon new-fallen snow.

At sight of it Josephine uttered a little cry, not loud but deep-- ay, a cry to bring tears into the eye of the hearer, and she stood trembling from head to foot, her hands clasped, and her eye fascinated and fixed on the cradle.

"My child under this roof! What have you done?" but her eye, fascinated and fixed, never left the cradle.

"I saw you languishing, dying, for want of him."

"Oh, if anybody should come?" But her eye never stirred an inch from the cradle.

"No, no, no! the door is locked. Jacintha watches below; there is no dan-- Ah, oh, poor sister!"

For, as Rose was speaking, the young mother sprang silently upon her child. You would have thought she was going to kill him; her head reared itself again and again like a crested snake's, and again and again and again and again plunged down upon the child, and she kissed his little body from head to foot with soft violence, and murmured, through her streaming tears, "My child! my darling! my angel! oh, my poor boy! my child! my child!"

I will ask my female readers of every degree to tell their brothers and husbands all the young noble did: how she sat on the floor, and had her child on her bosom; how she smiled over it through her tears; how she purred over it; how she, the stately one, lisped and prattled over it; and how life came pouring into her heart from it.

Before she had had it in her arms five minutes, her pale cheek was as red as a rose, and her eyes brighter than diamonds.

"Bless you, Rose! bless you! bless you! in one moment you have made me forget all I ever suffered in my life."

"There is a cold draught," cried she presently, with maternal anxiety; "close the panel, Rose."

"No, dear; or I could not call to Jacintha, or she to me; but I will shift the screen round between him and the draught. There, now, come to his aunt--a darling!"

Then Rose sat on the floor too, and Josephine put her boy on aunt's lap, and took a distant view of him. But she could not bear so vast a separation long. She must have him to her bosom again.

Presently my lord, finding himself hugged, opened his eyes, and, as a natural consequence, his mouth.

"Oh, that will never do," cried Rose, and they put him back in the cradle with all expedition, and began to rock it. Young master was not to be altogether appeased even by that. So Rose began singing an old-fashioned Breton chant or lullaby.

Josephine sang with her, and, singing, watched with a smile her boy drop off by degrees to sleep under the gentle motion and the lulling song. They sang and rocked till the lids came creeping down, and hid the great blue eyes; but still they sang and rocked, lulling the boy, and gladdening their own hearts; for the quaint old Breton ditty was tunable as the lark that carols over the green wheat in April; and the words so simple and motherly, that a nation had taken them to heart. Such songs bind ages together and make the lofty and the low akin by the great ties of music and the heart. Many a Breton peasant's bosom in the olden time had gushed over her sleeping boy as the young dame's of Beaurepaire gushed now--in this quaint, tuneful lullaby.

Now, as they kneeled over the cradle, one on each side, and rocked it, and sang that ancient chant, Josephine, who was opposite the screen, happening to raise her eyes, saw a strange thing.

There was the face of a man set close against the side of the screen, and peeping and peering out of the gloom. The light of her candle fell full on this face; it glared at her, set pale, wonder-struck, and vivid in the surrounding gloom.

Horror! It was her husband's face.

At first she was quite stupefied, and looked at it with soul and senses benumbed. Then she trembled, and put her hand to her eyes; for she thought it a phantom or a delusion of the mind. No: there it glared still. Then she trembled violently, and held out her left hand, the fingers working convulsively, to Rose, who was still singing.

But, at the same moment, the mouth of this face suddenly opened in a long-drawn breath. At this, Josephine uttered a violent shriek, and sprang to her feet, with her right hand quivering and pointing at that pale face set in the dark.

Rose started up, and, wheeling her head round, saw Raynal's gloomy face looking over her shoulder. She fell screaming upon her knees, and, almost out of her senses, began to pray wildly and piteously for mercy.

Josephine uttered one more cry, but this was the faint cry of nature, sinking under the shock of terror. She swooned dead away, and fell senseless on the floor ere Raynal could debarrass himself of the screen, and get to her.

This, then, was the scene that met Edouard's eyes. His affianced bride on her knees, white as a ghost, trembling, and screaming, rather than crying, for mercy. And Raynal standing over his wife, showing by the working of his iron features that he doubted whether she was worthy he should raise her.

One would have thought nothing could add to the terror of this scene. Yet it was added to. The baroness rang her bell violently in the room below. She had heard Josephine's scream and fall.

At the ringing of this shrill bell Rose shuddered like a maniac, and grovelled on her knees to Raynal, and seized his very knees and implored him to show some pity.

"O sir! kill us! we are culpable"--

Dring! dring! dring! dring! dring! pealed the baroness's bell again.

"But do not tell our mother. Oh, if you are a man! do not! do not! Show us some pity. We are but women. Mercy! mercy! mercy!"

"Speak out then," groaned Raynal. "What does this mean? Why has my wife swooned at sight of me?--whose is this child?"

"Whose?" stammered Rose. Till he said that, she never thought there could be a doubt whose child.

Dring! dring! dring! dring! dring!

"Oh, my God!" cried the poor girl, and her scared eyes glanced every way like some wild creature looking for a hole, however small, to escape by.

Edouard, seeing her hesitation, came down on her other side. "Whose is the child, Rose?" said he sternly.

"You, too? Why were we born? mercy! oh! pray let me go to my sister."

Dring! dring! dring! dring! dring! went the terrible bell.

The men were excited to fury by Rose's hesitation; they each seized an arm, and tore her screaming with fear at their violence, from her knees up to her feet between them with a single gesture.

"Whose is the child?"

"You hurt me!" said she bitterly to Edouard, and she left crying and was terribly calm and sullen all in a moment.

"Whose is the child?" roared Edouard and Raynal, in one raging breath. "Whose is the child?"

"It is mine."

These were not words; they were electric shocks.

The two arms that gripped Rose's arms were paralyzed, and dropped off them; and there was silence.

Then first the thought of all she had done with those three words began to rise and grow and surge over her. She stood, her eyes turned downwards, yet inwards, and dilating with horror.

Silence.

Now a mist began to spread over her eyes, and in it she saw indistinctly the figure of Raynal darting to her sister's side, and raising her head.

She dared not look round on the other side. She heard feet stagger on the floor. She heard a groan, too; but not a word.

Horrible silence.

With nerves strung to frenzy, and quivering ears, that magnified every sound, she waited for a reproach, a curse; either would have been some little relief. But no! a silence far more terrible.

Then a step wavered across the room. Her soul was in her ear. She could hear and feel the step totter, and it shook her as it went. All sounds were trebled to her. Then it struck on the stone step of the staircase, not like a step, but a knell; another step, another and another; down to the very bottom. Each slow step made her head ring and her heart freeze.

At last she heard no more. Then a scream of anguish and recall rose to her lips. She fought it down, for Josephine and Raynal. Edouard was gone. She had but her sister now, the sister she loved better than herself; the sister to save whose life and honor she had this moment sacrificed her own, and all a woman lives for.

She turned, with a wild cry of love and pity, to that sister's side to help her; and when she kneeled down beside her, an iron arm was promptly thrust out between the beloved one and her.

"This is my care, madame," said Raynal, coldly.

There was no mistaking his manner. The stained one was not to touch his wife.

She looked at him in piteous amazement at his ingratitude. "It is well," said she. "It is just. I deserve this from you."

She said no more, but drooped gently down beside the cradle, and hid her forehead in the clothes beside the child that had brought all this woe, and sobbed bitterly.

Then honest Raynal began to be sorry for her, in spite of himself. But there was no time for this. Josephine stirred; and, at the same moment, a violent knocking came at the door of the apartment, and the new servant's voice, crying, "Ladies, for Heaven's sake, what is the matter? The baroness heard a fall--she is getting up--she will be here. What shall I tell her is the matter?"

Raynal was going to answer, but Rose, who had started up at the knocking, put her hand in a moment right before his mouth, and ran to the door. "There is nothing the matter; tell mamma I am coming down to her directly." She flew back to Raynal in an excitement little short of frenzy. "Help me carry her into her own room," cried she imperiously. Raynal obeyed by instinct; for the fiery girl spoke like a general, giving the word of command, with the enemy in front. He carried the true culprit in his arms, and laid her gently on her bed.

"Now put it out of sight--take this, quick, man! quick!" cried Rose.

Raynal went to the cradle. "Ah! my poor girl," said he, as he lifted it in his arms, "this is a sorry business; to have to hide your own child from your own mother!"

"Colonel Raynal," said Rose, "do not insult a poor, despairing girl. C'est lache."

"I am silent, young woman," said Raynal, sternly. "What is to be done?"

"Take it down the steps, and give it to Jacintha. Stay, here is a candle; I go to tell mamma you are come; and, Colonel Raynal, I never injured you: if you tell my mother you will stab her to the heart, and me, and may the curse of cowards light on you!--may"--

"Enough!" said Raynal, sternly. "Do you take me for a babbling girl? I love your mother better than you do, or this brat of yours would not be here. I shall not bring her gray hairs down with sorrow to the grave. I shall speak of this villany to but one person; and to him I shall talk with this, and not with the idle tongue." And he tapped his sword-hilt with a sombre look of terrible significance.

He carried out the cradle. The child slept sweetly through it all.

Rose darted into Josephine's room, took the key from the inside to the outside, locked the door, put the key in her pocket, and ran down to her mother's room; her knees trembled under her as she went.

Meantime, Jacintha, sleeping tranquilly, suddenly felt her throat griped, and heard a loud voice ring in her ear; then she was lifted, and wrenched, and dropped. She found herself lying clear of the steps in the moonlight; her head was where her feet had been, and her candle out.

She uttered shriek upon shriek, and was too frightened to get up. She thought it was supernatural; some old De Beaurepaire had served her thus for sleeping on her post. A struggle took place between her fidelity and her superstitious fears. Fidelity conquered. Quaking in every limb, she groped up the staircase for her candle.

It was gone.

Then a still more sickening fear came over her.

What if this was no spirit's work, but a human arm--a strong one-- some man's arm?

Her first impulse was to dart up the stairs, and make sure that no calamity had befallen through her mistimed drowsiness. But, when she came to try, her dread of the supernatural revived. She could not venture without a light up those stairs, thronged perhaps with angry spirits. She ran to the kitchen. She found the tinderbox, and with trembling hands struck a light. She came back shading it with her shaky hands; and, committing her soul to the care of Heaven, she crept quaking up the stairs. Then she heard voices above, and that restored her more; she mounted more steadily. Presently she stopped, for a heavy step was coming down. It did not sound like a woman's step. It came further down; she turned to fly.

"Jacintha!" said a deep voice, that in this stone cylinder rang like thunder from a tomb.

"Oh! saints and angels save me!" yelled Jacintha; and fell on her knees, and hid her head for security; and down went her candlestick clattering on the stone.

"Don't be a fool!" said the iron voice. "Get up and take this."

She raised her head by slow degrees, shuddering. A man was holding out a cradle to her; the candle he carried lighted up his face; it was Colonel Raynal.

She stared at him stupidly, but never moved from her knees, and the candle began to shake violently in her hand, as she herself trembled from head to foot.

Then Raynal concluded she was in the plot; but, scorning to reproach a servant, he merely said, "Well, what do you kneel there for, gaping at me like that? Take this, I tell you, and carry it out of the house."

He shoved the cradle roughly down into her hands, then turned on his heel without a word.

Jacintha collapsed on the stairs, and the cradle beside her, for all the power was driven out of her body; she could hardly support her own weight, much less the cradle.

She rocked herself, and moaned out, "Oh, what's this? oh, what's this?"

A cold perspiration came over her whole frame.

"What could this mean? What on earth had happened?"

She took up the candle, for it was lying burning and guttering on the stairs; scraped up the grease with the snuffers, and by force of habit tried to polish it clean with a bit of paper that shook between her fingers; she did not know what she was doing. When she recovered her wits, she took the child out of the cradle, and wrapped it carefully in her shawl; then went slowly down the stairs; and holding him close to her bosom, with a furtive eye, and brain confused, and a heart like lead, stole away to the tenantless cottage, where Madame Jouvenel awaited her.

Meantime, Rose, with quaking heart, had encountered the baroness. She found her pale and agitated, and her first question was, "What is the matter? what have you been all doing over my head?"

"Darling mother," replied Rose, evasively, "something has happened that will rejoice your heart. Somebody has come home."

"My son? eh, no! impossible! We cannot be so happy."

"He will be with you directly."

The old lady now trembled with joyful agitation.

"In five minutes I will bring him to you. Shall you be dressed? I will ring for the girl to help you."

"But, Rose, the scream, and that terrible fall. Ah! where is Josephine?"

"Can't you guess, mamma? Oh, the fall was only the screen; they stumbled over it in the dark."

"They! who?"

"Colonel Raynal, and--and Edouard. I will tell you, mamma, but don't be angry, or even mention it; they wanted to surprise us. They saw a light burning, and they crept on tiptoe up to the tapestried room, where Josephine and I were, and they did give us a great fright."

"What madness!" cried the baroness, angrily; "and in Josephine's weak state! Such a surprise might have driven her into a fit."

"Yes, it was foolish, but let it pass, mamma. Don't speak of it, for he is so sorry about it."

Then Rose slipped out, ordered a fire in the salon, and not in the tapestried room, and the next minute was at her sister's door. There she found Raynal knocking, and asking Josephine how she was.

"Pray leave her to me a moment," said she. "I will bring her down to you. Mamma is waiting for you in the salon."

Raynal went down. Rose unlocked the bedroom-door, went in, and, to her horror, found Josephine lying on the floor. She dashed water in her face, and applied every remedy; and at last she came back to life, and its terrors.

"Save me, Rose! save me--he is coming to kill me--I heard him at the door," and she clung trembling piteously to Rose.

Then Rose, seeing her terror, was almost glad at the suicidal falsehood she had told. She comforted and encouraged Josephine and-- deceived her. (This was the climax.)

"All is well, my poor coward," she cried; "your fears are all imaginary; another has owned the child, and the story is believed."

"Another! impossible! He would not believe it."

"He does believe it--he shall believe it."

Rose then, feeling by no means sure that Josephine, terrified as she was, would consent to let her sister come to shame to screen her, told her boldly that Jacintha had owned herself the mother of the child, and that Raynal's only feeling towards her was pity, and regret at having so foolishly frightened her, weakened as she was by illness. "I told him you had been ill, dear. But how came you on the ground?"

"I had come to myself; I was on my knees praying. He tapped. I heard his voice. I remember no more. I must have fainted again directly."

Rose had hard work to make her believe that her guilt, as she called it, was not known; and even then she could not prevail on her to come down-stairs, until she said, "If you don't, he will come to you." On that Josephine consented eagerly, and with trembling fingers began to adjust her hair and her dress for the interview.

All this terrible night Rose fought for her sister. She took her down-stairs to the salon; she put her on the sofa; she sat by her and pressed her hand constantly to give her courage. She told the story of the surprise her own way, before the whole party, including the doctor, to prevent Raynal from being called on to tell it his way. She laughed at Josephine's absurdity, but excused it on account of her feeble health. In short, she threw more and more dust in all their eyes.

But by the time when the rising sun came faintly in and lighted the haggard party, where the deceived were happy, the deceivers wretched, the supernatural strength this young girl had shown was almost exhausted. She felt an hysterical impulse to scream and weep: each minute it became more and more ungovernable. Then came an unexpected turn. Raynal after a long and tiring talk with his mother, as he called her, looked at his watch, and in a characteristic way coolly announced his immediate departure, this being the first hint he had given them that he was not come back for good.

The baroness was thunderstruck.

Rose and Josephine pressed one another's hands, and had much ado not to utter a loud cry of joy.

Raynal explained that he was the bearer of despatches. "I must be off: not an hour to lose. Don't fret, mother, I shall soon be back again, if I am not knocked on the head."

Raynal took leave of them all. When it came to Rose's turn, he drew her aside and whispered into her ear, "Who is the man?"

She started, and seemed dumfounded.

"Tell me, or I ask my wife."

"She has promised me not to betray me: I made her swear. Spare me now, brother; I will tell you all when you come back."

"That is a bargain: now hear me swear: he shall marry you, or he shall die by my hand."

He confirmed this by a tremendous oath.

Rose shuddered, but said nothing, only she thought to herself, "I am forewarned. Never shall you know who is the father of that child."

He was no sooner gone than the baroness insisted on knowing what this private communication between him and Rose was about.

"Oh," said Rose, "he was only telling me to keep up your courage and Josephine's till he comes back."

This was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning. The next minute the sisters, exhausted by their terrible struggle, went feebly, with downcast eyes, along the corridor and up the staircase to Josephine's room.

They went hand in hand. They sank down, dressed as they were, on Josephine's bed, and clung to one another and trembled together, till their exhausted natures sank into uneasy slumbers, from which each in turn would wake ever and anon with a convulsive start, and clasp her sister tighter to her breast.

Theirs was a marvellous love. Even a course of deceit had not yet prevailed to separate or chill their sister bosoms. But still in this deep and wonderful love there were degrees: one went a shade deeper than the other now--ay, since last night. Which? why, she who had sacrificed herself for the other, and dared not tell her, lest the sacrifice should be refused.

It was the gray of the morning, and foggy, when Raynal, after taking leave, went to the stable for his horse. At the stable-door he came upon a man sitting doubled up on the very stones of the yard, with his head on his knees. The figure lifted his head, and showed him the face of Edouard Riviere, white and ghastly: his hair lank with the mist, his teeth chattering with cold and misery. The poor wretch had walked frantically all night round and round the chateau, waiting till Raynal should come out. He told him so.

"But why didn't you?--Ah! I see. No! you could not go into the house after that. My poor fellow, there is but one thing for you to do. Turn your back on her, and forget she ever lived; she is dead to you."

"There is something to be done besides that," said Edouard, gloomily.

"What?"

"Vengeance."

"That is my affair, young man. When I come back from the Rhine, she will tell me who her seducer is. She has promised."

"And don't you see through that?" said Edouard, gnashing his teeth; "that is only to gain time: she will never tell you. She is young in years, but old in treachery."

He groaned and was silent a moment, then laying his hand on Raynal's arm said grimly, "Thank Heaven, we don't depend on her for information! I know the villain."

Raynal's eyes flashed: "Ah! then tell me this moment."

"It is that scoundrel Dujardin."

"Dujardin! What do you mean?"

"I mean that, while you were fighting for France, your house was turned into a hospital for wounded soldiers."

"And pray, sir, to what more honorable use could they put it?"

"Well, this Dujardin was housed by you, was nursed by your wife and all the family; and in return has seduced your sister, my affianced."

"I can hardly believe that. Camille Dujardin was always a man of honor, and a good soldier."

"Colonel, there has been no man near the place but this Dujardin. I tell you it is he. Don't make me tear my bleeding heart out: must I tell you how often I caught them together, how I suspected, and how she gulled me? blind fool that I was, to believe a woman's words before my own eyes. I swear to you he is the villain; the only question is, which of us two is to kill him."

"Where is the man?"

"In the army of the Rhine."

"Ah! all the better."

"Covered with glory and honor. Curse him! oh, curse him! curse him!"

"I am in luck. I am going to the Rhine."

"I know it. That is why I waited here all through this night of misery. Yes, you are in luck. But you will send me a line when you have killed him; will you not? Then I shall know joy again. Should he escape you, he shall not escape me."

"Young man," said Raynal, with dignity, "this rage is unmanly. Besides, we have not heard his side of the story. He is a good soldier; perhaps he is not all to blame: or perhaps passion has betrayed him into a sin that his conscience and honor disapprove: if so, he must not die. You think only of your wrong: it is natural: but I am the girl's brother; guardian of her honor and my own. His life is precious as gold. I shall make him marry her."

"What! reward him for his villany?" cried Edouard, frantically.

"A mighty reward," replied Raynal, with a sneer.

"You leave one thing out of the calculation, monsieur," said Edouard, trembling with anger, "that I will kill your brother-in-law at the altar, before her eyes."

"You leave one thing out of the calculation: that you will first have to cross swords, at the altar, with me."

"So be it. I will not draw on my old commandant. I could not; but be sure I will catch him and her alone some day, and the bride shall be a widow in her honeymoon."

"As you please," said Raynal, coolly. "That is all fair, as you have been wronged. I shall make her an honest wife, and then you may make her an honest widow. (This is what they call love, and sneer at me for keeping clear of it.) But neither he nor you shall keep my sister what she is now, a ----," and he used a word out of camp.

Edouard winced and groaned. "Oh! don't call her by such a name. There is some mystery. She loved me once. There must have been some strange seduction."

"Now you deceive yourself," said Raynal. "I never saw a girl that could take her own part better than she can; she is not like her sister at all in character. Not that I excuse him; it was a dishonorable act, an ungrateful act to my wife and my mother."

"And to you."

"Now listen to me: in four days I shall stand before him. I shall not go into a pet like you; I am in earnest. I shall just say to him, 'Dujardin, I know all!' Then if he is guilty his face will show it directly. Then I shall say, 'Comrade, you must marry her whom you have dishonored.'"

"He will not. He is a libertine, a rascal."

"You are speaking of a man you don't know. He will marry her and repair the wrong he has done."

"Suppose he refuses?"

"Why should he refuse? The girl is not ugly nor old, and if she has done a folly, he was her partner in it."

"But suppose he refuses?"

Raynal ground his teeth. "Refuse? If he does, I'll run my sword through his carcass then and there, and the hussy shall go into a convent."

The French army lay before a fortified place near the Rhine, which we will call Philipsburg.

This army knew Bonaparte by report only; it was commanded by generals of the old school.

Philipsburg was defended on three sides by the nature of the ground; but on the side that faced the French line of march there was only a zigzag wall, pierced, and a low tower or two at each of the salient angles.

There were evidences of a tardy attempt to improve the defences. In particular there was a large round bastion, about three times the height of the wall; but the masonry was new, and the very embrasures were not yet cut.

Young blood was for assaulting these equivocal fortifications at the end of the day's march that brought the French advanced guard in sight of the place; but the old generals would not hear of it; the soldiers' lives must not be flung away assaulting a place that could be reduced in twenty-one days with mathematical certainty. For at this epoch a siege was looked on as a process with a certain result, the only problem was in how many days would the place be taken; and even this they used to settle to a day or two on paper by arithmetic; so many feet of wall, and so many guns on the one side; so many guns, so many men, and such and such a soil to cut the trenches in on the other: result, two figures varying from fourteen to forty. These two figures represented the duration of the siege.

For all that, siege arithmetic, right in general, has often been terribly disturbed by one little incident, that occurs from time to time; viz., Genius inside. And, indeed, this is one of the sins of genius; it goes and puts out calculations that have stood the brunt of years. Archimedes and Todleben were, no doubt, clever men in their way and good citizens, yet one characteristic of delicate men's minds they lacked--veneration; they showed a sad disrespect for the wisdom of the ancients, deranged the calculations which so much learning and patient thought had hallowed, disturbed the minds of white-haired veterans, took sieges out of the grasp of science, and plunged them back into the field of wild conjecture.

Our generals then sat down at fourteen hundred yards' distance, and planned the trenches artistically, and directed them to be cut at artful angles, and so creep nearer and nearer the devoted town. Then the Prussians, whose hearts had been in their shoes at first sight of the French shakos, plucked up, and turned not the garrison only but the population of the town into engineers and masons. Their fortifications grew almost as fast as the French trenches.

The first day of the siege, a young but distinguished brigadier in the French army rode to the quarters of General Raimbaut, who commanded his division, and was his personal friend, and respectfully but firmly entreated the general to represent to the commander-in-chief the propriety of assaulting that new bastion before it should become dangerous. "My brigade shall carry it in fifteen minutes, general," said he.

"What! cross all that open under fire? One-half your brigade would never reach the bastion."

"But the other half would take it."

"That is not so certain."

General Raimbaut refused to forward the young colonel's proposal to headquarters. "I will not subject you to two refusals in one matter," said he, kindly.

The young colonel lingered. He said, respectfully, "One question, general, when that bastion cuts its teeth will it be any easier to take than now?"

"Certainly; it will always be easier to take it from the sap than to cross the open under fire to it, and take it. Come, colonel, to your trenches; and if your friend should cut its teeth, you shall have a battery in your attack that will set its teeth on edge. Ha! ha!"

The young colonel did not echo his chief's humor; he saluted gravely, and returned to the trenches.

The next morning three fresh tiers of embrasures grinned one above another at the besiegers. The besieged had been up all night, and not idle. In half these apertures black muzzles showed themselves.

The bastion had cut its front teeth.

Thirteenth day of the siege.

The trenches were within four hundred yards of the enemy's guns, and it was hot work in them. The enemy had three tiers of guns in the round bastion, and on the top they had got a long 48-pounder, which they worked with a swivel joint, or the like, and threw a great roaring shot into any part of the French lines.

As to the commander-in-chief and his generals, they were dotted about a long way in the rear, and no shot came as far as them; but in the trenches the men began now to fall fast, especially on the left attack, which faced the round bastion. Our young colonel had got his heavy battery, and every now and then he would divert the general efforts of the bastion, and compel it to concentrate its attention on him, by pounding away at it till it was all in sore places. But he meant it worse mischief than that. Still, as heretofore, regarding it as the key to Philipsburg, he had got a large force of engineers at work driving a mine towards it, and to this he trusted more than to breaching it; for the bigger holes he made in it by day were all stopped at night by the townspeople.

This colonel was not a favorite in the division to which his brigade belonged. He was a good soldier, but a dull companion. He was also accused of hauteur and of an unsoldierly reserve with his brother officers.

Some loose-tongued ones even called him a milk-sop, because he was constantly seen conversing with the priest--he who had nothing to say to an honest soldier.

Others said, "No, hang it, he is not a milk-sop: he is a tried soldier: he is a sulky beggar all the same." Those under his immediate command were divided in opinion about him. There was something about him they could not understand. Why was his sallow face so stern, so sad? and why with all that was his voice so gentle? somehow the few words that did fall from his mouth were prized. One old soldier used to say, "I would rather have a word from our brigadier than from the commander-in-chief." Others thought he must at some part of his career have pillaged a church, taken the altar-piece, and sold it to a picture-dealer in Paris, or whipped the earrings out of the Madonna's ears, or admitted the female enemy to quarter upon ungenerous conditions: this, or some such crime to which we poor soldiers are liable: and now was committing the mistake of remording himself about it. "Always alongside the chaplain, you see!"

This cold and silent man had won the heart of the most talkative sergeant in the French army. Sergeant La Croix protested with many oaths that all the best generals of the day had commanded him in turn, and that his present colonel was the first that had succeeded in inspiring him with unlimited confidence. "He knows every point of war--this one," said La Croix, "I heard him beg and pray for leave to storm this thundering bastion before it was armed: but no, the old muffs would be wiser than our colonel. So now here we are kept at bay by a place that Julius Caesar and Cannibal wouldn't have made two bites at apiece; no more would I if I was the old boy out there behind the hill." In such terms do sergeants denote commanders-in-chief--at a distance. A voluble sergeant has more influence with the men than the minister of war is perhaps aware: on the whole, the 24th brigade would have followed its gloomy colonel to grim death and a foot farther. One thing gave these men a touch of superstitious reverence for their commander. He seemed to them free from physical weakness. He never sat down to dinner, and seemed never to sleep. At no hour of the day or night were the sentries safe from his visits.

Very annoying. But, after awhile, it led to keen watchfulness: the more so that the sad and gloomy colonel showed by his manner he appreciated it. Indeed, one night he even opened his marble jaws, and told Sergeant La Croix that a watchful sentry was an important soldier, not to his brigade only, but to the whole army. Judge whether the maxim and the implied encomium did not circulate next morning, with additions.

Sixteenth day of the siege. The round bastion opened fire at eight o'clock, not on the opposing battery, but on the right of the French attack. Its advanced position enabled a portion of its guns to rake these trenches slant-wise: and depressing its guns it made the round shot strike the ground first and ricochet over.

On this our colonel opened on them with all his guns: one of these he served himself. Among his other warlike accomplishments, he was a wonderful shot with a cannon. He showed them capital practice this morning: drove two embrasures into one, and knocked about a ton of masonry off the parapet. Then taking advantage of this, he served two of his guns with grape, and swept the enemy off the top of the bastion, and kept it clear. He made it so hot they could not work the upper guns. Then they turned the other two tiers all upon him, and at it both sides went ding, dong, till the guns were too hot to be worked. So then Sergeant La Croix popped his head up from the battery, and showed the enemy a great white plate. This was meant to convey to them an invitation to dine with the French army: the other side of the table of course.

To the credit of Prussian intelligence be it recorded, that this pantomimic hint was at once taken and both sides went to dinner.

The fighting colonel, however, remained in the battery, and kept a detachment of his gunners employed cooling the guns and repairing the touch-holes. He ordered his two cutlets and his glass of water into the battery.

Meantime, the enemy fired a single gun at long intervals, as much as to say, "We had the last word."

Let trenches be cut ever so artfully, there will be a little space exposed here and there at the angles. These spaces the men are ordered to avoid, or whip quickly across them into cover.

Now the enemy had just got the range of one of these places with their solitary gun, and had already dropped a couple of shot right on to it. A camp follower with a tray, two cutlets, and a glass of water, came to this open space just as a puff of white smoke burst from the bastion. Instead of instantly seeking shelter till the shot had struck, he, in his inexperience, thought the shot must have struck, and all danger be over. He stayed there mooning instead of pelting under cover: the shot (eighteen-pound) struck him right on the breast, knocked him into spilikins, and sent the mutton cutlets flying.

The human fragments lay quiet, ten yards off. But a soldier that was eating his dinner kicked it over, and jumped up at the side of "Death's Alley" (as it was christened next minute), and danced and yelled with pain.

"Haw! haw! haw!" roared a soldier from the other side of the alley.

"What is that?" cried Sergeant La Croix. "What do you laugh at, Private Cadel?" said he sternly, for, though he was too far in the trench to see, he had heard that horrible sound a soldier knows from every other, the "thud" of a round shot striking man or horse.

"Sergeant," said Cadel, respectfully, "I laugh to see Private Dard, that got the wind of the shot, dance and sing, when the man that got the shot itself does not say a word."

"The wind of the shot, you rascal!" roared Private Dard: "look here!" and he showed the blood running down his face.

The shot had actually driven a splinter of bone out of the sutler into Dard's temple.

"I am the unluckiest fellow in the army," remonstrated Dard: and he stamped in a circle.

"Seems to me you are only the second unluckiest this time," said a young soldier with his mouth full; and, with a certain dry humor, he pointed vaguely over his shoulder with the fork towards the corpse.

The trenches laughed and assented.

This want of sympathy and justice irritated Dard. "You cursed fools!" cried he. "He is gone where we must all go--without any trouble. But look at me. I am always getting barked. Dogs of Prussians! they pick me out among a thousand. I shall have a headache all the afternoon, you see else."

Some of our heads would never have ached again: but Dard had a good thick skull.

Dard pulled out his spilikin savagely.

"I'll wrap it up in paper for Jacintha," said he. "Then that will learn her what a poor soldier has to go through."

Even this consolation was denied Private Dard.

Corporal Coriolanus Gand, a bit of an infidel from Lyons, who sometimes amused himself with the Breton's superstition, told him with a grave face, that the splinter belonged not to him, but to the sutler, and, though so small, was doubtless a necessary part of his frame.

"If you keep that, it will be a bone of contention between you two," said he; "especially at midnight. He will be always coming back to you for it."

"There, take it away!" said the Breton hastily, "and bury it with the poor fellow."

Sergeant La Croix presented himself before the colonel with a rueful face and saluted him and said, "Colonel, I beg a thousand pardons; your dinner has been spilt--a shot from the bastion."

"No matter," said the colonel. "Give me a piece of bread instead."

La Croix went for it himself, and on his return found Cadel sitting on one side of Death's Alley, and Dard with his head bound up on the other. They had got a bottle which each put up in turn wherever he fancied the next round shot would strike, and they were betting their afternoon rations which would get the Prussians to hit the bottle first.

La Croix pulled both their ears playfully.

"Time is up for playing marbles," said he. "Be off, and play at duty," and he bundled them into the battery.

It was an hour past midnight: a cloudy night. The moon was up, but seen only by fitful gleams. A calm, peaceful silence reigned.

Dard was sentinel in the battery.

An officer going his rounds found the said sentinel flat instead of vertical. He stirred him with his scabbard, and up jumped Dard.

"It's all right, sergeant. O Lord! it's the colonel. I wasn't asleep, colonel."

"I have not accused you. But you will explain what you were doing."

"Colonel," said Dard, all in a flutter, "I was taking a squint at them, because I saw something. The beggars are building a wall, now."

"Where?"

"Between us and the bastion."

"Show me."

"I can't, colonel; the moon has gone in; but I did see it."

"How long was it?"

"About a hundred yards."

"How high?"

"Colonel, it was ten feet high if it was an inch."

"Have you good sight?"

"La! colonel, wasn't I a bit of a poacher before I took to the bayonet?"

"Good! Now reflect. If you persist in this statement, I turn out the brigade on your information."

"I'll stand the fire of a corporal's guard at break of day if I make a mistake now," said Dard.

The colonel glided away, called his captain and first lieutenants, and said two words in each ear, that made them spring off their backs.

Dard, marching to an fro, musket on shoulder, found himself suddenly surrounded by grim, silent, but deadly eager soldiers, that came pouring like bees into the open space behind the battery. The officers came round the colonel.

"Attend to two things," said he to the captains. "Don't fire till they are within ten yards: and don't follow them unless I lead you."

The men were then told off by companies, some to the battery, some to the trenches, some were kept on each side Death's Alley, ready for a rush.

They were not all of them in position, when those behind the parapet saw, as it were, something deepen the gloom of night, some fourscore yards to the front: it was like a line of black ink suddenly drawn upon a sheet covered with Indian ink.

It seems quite stationary. The novices wondered what it was. The veterans muttered--"Three deep."

Though it looked stationary, it got blacker and blacker. The soldiers of the 24th brigade griped their muskets hard, and set their teeth, and the sergeants had much ado to keep them quiet.

All of a sudden, a loud yell on the right of the brigade, two or three single shots from the trenches in that direction, followed by a volley, the cries of wounded men, and the fierce hurrahs of an attacking party.

Our colonel knew too well those sounds: the next parallel had been surprised, and the Prussian bayonet was now silently at work.

Disguise was now impossible. At the first shot, a guttural voice in front of Dujardin's men was heard to give a word of command. There was a sharp rattle and in a moment the thick black line was tipped with glittering steel.

A roar and a rush, and the Prussian line three deep came furiously like a huge steel-pointed wave, at the French lines. A tremendous wave of fire rushed out to meet that wave of steel: a crash of two hundred muskets, and all was still. Then you could see through the black steel-tipped line in a hundred frightful gaps, and the ground sparkled with bayonets and the air rang with the cries of the wounded.

A tremendous cheer from the brigade, and the colonel charged at the head of his column, out by Death's Alley.

The broken wall was melting away into the night. The colonel wheeled his men to the right: one company, led by the impetuous young Captain Jullien, followed the flying enemy.

The other attack had been only too successful. They shot the sentries, and bayoneted many of the soldiers in their tents: others escaped by running to the rear, and some into the next parallel.

Several, half dressed, snatched up their muskets, killed one Prussian, and fell riddled like sieves.

A gallant officer got a company together into the place of arms and formed in line.

Half the Prussian force went at them, the rest swept the trenches: the French company delivered a deadly volley, and the next moment clash the two forces crossed bayonets, and a silent deadly stabbing match was played: the final result of which was inevitable. The Prussians were five to one. The gallant officer and the poor fellows who did their duty so stoutly, had no thought left but to die hard, when suddenly a roaring cheer seemed to come from the rear rank of the enemy. "France! France!" Half the 24th brigade came leaping and swarming over the trenches in the Prussian rear. The Prussians wavered. "France!" cried the little party that were being overpowered, and charged in their turn with such fury that in two seconds the two French corps went through the enemy's centre like paper, and their very bayonets clashed together in more than one Prussian body.

Broken thus in two fragments the Prussian corps ceased to exist as a military force. The men fled each his own way back to the fort, and many flung away their muskets, for French soldiers were swarming in from all quarters. At this moment, bang! bang! bang! from the bastion.

"They are firing on my brigade," said our colonel. "Who has led his company there against my orders? Captain Neville, into the battery, and fire twenty rounds at the bastion! Aim at the flashes from their middle tier."

"Yes, colonel."

The battery opened with all its guns on the bastion. The right attack followed suit. The town answered, and a furious cannonade roared and blazed all down both lines till daybreak. Hell seemed broken loose.

Captain Jullien had followed the flying foe: but could not come up with them: and, as the enemy had prepared for every contingency, the fatal bastion, after first throwing a rocket or two to discover their position, poured showers of grape into them, killed many, and would have killed more but that Captain Neville and his gunners happened by mere accident to dismount one gun and to kill a couple of gunners at the others. This gave the remains of the company time to disperse and run back. When the men were mustered, Captain Jullien and twenty-five of his company did not answer to their names. At daybreak they were visible from the trenches lying all by themselves within eighty yards of the bastion.

A flag of truce came from the fort: the dead were removed on both sides and buried. Some Prussian officers strolled into the French lines. Civilities and cigars exchanged: "Bon jour," "Gooten daeg:" then at it again, ding dong all down the line blazing and roaring.

At twelve o'clock the besieged had got a man on horseback, on top of a hill, with colored flags in his hand, making signals.

"What are you up to now?" inquired Dard.

"You will see," said La Croix, affecting mystery; he knew no more than the other.

Presently off went Long Tom on the top of the bastion, and the shot came roaring over the heads of the speakers.

The flags were changed, and off went Long Tom again at an elevation.

Ten seconds had scarcely elapsed when a tremendous explosion took place on the French right. Long Tom was throwing red-hot shot; one had fallen on a powder wagon, and blown it to pieces, and killed two poor fellows and a horse, and turned an artillery man at some distance into a seeming nigger, but did him no great harm; only took him three days to get the powder out of his clothes with pipe clay, and off his face with raw potato-peel.

When the tumbril exploded, the Prussians could be heard to cheer, and they turned to and fired every iron spout they owned. Long Tom worked all day.

They got into a corner where the guns of the battery could not hit them or him, and there was his long muzzle looking towards the sky, and sending half a hundredweight of iron up into the clouds, and plunging down a mile off into the French lines.

And, at every shot, the man on horseback made signals to let the gunners know where the shot fell.

At last, about four in the afternoon, they threw a forty-eight-pound shot slap into the commander-in-chief's tent, a mile and a half behind trenches.

Down comes a glittering aide-de-camp as hard as he can gallop.

"Colonel Dujardin, what are you about, sir? Your bastion has thrown a round shot into the commander-in-chief's tent."

The colonel did not appear so staggered as the aide-de-camp expected.

"Ah, indeed!" said he quietly. "I observed they were trying distances."

"Must not happen again, colonel. You must drive them from the gun."

"How?"

"Why, where is the difficulty?"

"If you will do me the honor to step into the battery, I will show you," said the colonel.

"If you please," said the aide-de-camp stiffly.

Colonel Dujardin took him to the parapet, and began, in a calm, painstaking way, to show him how and why none of his guns could be brought to bear upon Long Tom.

In the middle of the explanation a melodious sound was heard in the air above them, like a swarm of Brobdingnag bees.

"What is that?" inquired the aide-de-camp.

"What? I see nothing."

"That humming noise."

"Oh, that? Prussian bullets. Ah, by-the-by, it is a compliment to your uniform, monsieur; they take you for some one of importance. Well, as I was observing"--

"Your explanation is sufficient, colonel; let us get out of this. Ha, ha! you are a cool hand, colonel, I must say. But your battery is a warm place enough: I shall report it so at headquarters."

The grim colonel relaxed.

"Captain," said he politely, "you shall not have ridden to my post in vain. Will you lend me your horse for ten minutes?"

"Certainly; and I will inspect your trenches meantime."

"Do so; oblige me by avoiding that angle; it is exposed, and the enemy have got the range to an inch."

Colonel Dujardin slipped into his quarters; off with his half-dress jacket and his dirty boots, and presently out he came full fig, glittering brighter than the other, with one French and two foreign orders shining on his breast, mounted the aide-de-camp's horse, and away full pelt.

Admitted, after some delay, into the generalissimo's tent, Dujardin found the old gentleman surrounded by his staff and wroth: nor was the danger to which he had been exposed his sole cause of ire.

The shot had burst through his canvas, struck a table on which was a large inkstand, and had squirted the whole contents over the despatches he was writing for Paris.

Now this old gentleman prided himself upon the neatness of his despatches: a blot on his paper darkened his soul.

Colonel Dujardin expressed his profound regret. The commander, however, continued to remonstrate. "I have a great deal of writing to do," said he, "as you must be aware; and, when I am writing, I expect to be quiet."

Colonel Dujardin assented respectfully to the justice of this. He then explained at full length why he could not bring a gun in the battery to silence "Long Tom," and quietly asked to be permitted to run a gun out of the trenches, and take a shot at the offender.

"It is a point-blank distance, and I have a new gun, with which a man ought to be able to hit his own ball at three hundred yards."

The commander hesitated.

"I cannot have the men exposed."

"I engage not to lose a man--except him who fires the gun. HE must take his chance."

"Well, colonel, it must be done by volunteers. The men must not be ordered out on such a service as that."

Colonel Dujardin bowed, and retired.

"Volunteers to go out of the trenches!" cried Sergeant La Croix, in a stentorian voice, standing erect as a poker, and swelling with importance.

There were fifty offers in less than as many seconds.

"Only twelve allowed to go," said the sergeant; "and I am one," added he, adroitly inserting himself.

A gun was taken down, placed on a carriage, and posted near Death's Alley, but out of the line of fire.

The colonel himself superintended the loading of this gun; and to the surprise of the men had the shot weighed first, and then weighed out the powder himself.

He then waited quietly a long time till the bastion pitched one of its periodical shots into Death's Alley, but no sooner had the shot struck, and sent the sand flying past the two lanes of curious noses, than Colonel Dujardin jumped upon the gun and waved his cocked hat. At this preconcerted signal, his battery opened fire on the bastion, and the battery to his right opened on the wall that fronted them; and the colonel gave the word to run the gun out of the trenches. They ran it out into the cloud of smoke their own guns were belching forth, unseen by the enemy; but they had no sooner twisted it into the line of Long Tom, than the smoke was gone, and there they were, a fair mark.

"Back into the trenches, all but one!" roared Dujardin.

And in they ran like rabbits.

"Quick! the elevation."

Colonel Dujardin and La Croix raised the muzzle to the mark--hoo, hoo, hoo! ping, ping, ping! came the bullets about their ears.

"Away with you!" cried the colonel, taking the linstock from him.

Then Colonel Dujardin, fifteen yards from the trenches, in full blazing uniform, showed two armies what one intrepid soldier can do. He kneeled down and adjusted his gun, just as he would have done in a practising ground. He had a pot shot to take, and a pot shot he would take. He ignored three hundred muskets that were levelled at him. He looked along his gun, adjusted it, and re-adjusted it to a hair's breadth. The enemy's bullets pattered upon it: still he adjusted it delicately. His men were groaning and tearing their hair inside at his danger.

At last it was levelled to his mind, and then his movements were as quick as they had hitherto been slow. In a moment he stood erect in the half-fencing attitude of a gunner, and his linstock at the touch-hole: a huge tongue of flame, a volume of smoke, a roar, and the iron thunderbolt was on its way, and the colonel walked haughtily but rapidly back to the trenches; for in all this no bravado. He was there to make a shot; not to throw a chance of life away watching the effect.

Ten thousand eyes did that for him.

Both French and Prussians risked their own lives craning out to see what a colonel in full uniform was doing under fire from a whole line of forts, and what would be his fate; but when he fired the gun their curiosity left the man and followed the iron thunderbolt.

For two seconds all was uncertain; the ball was travelling.

Tom gave a rear like a wild horse, his protruding muzzle went up sky-high, then was seen no more, and a ring of old iron and a clatter of fragments was heard on the top of the bastion. Long Tom was dismounted. Oh! the roar of laughter and triumph from one end to another of the trenches; and the clapping of forty thousand hands that went on for full five minutes; then the Prussians, either through a burst of generous praise for an act so chivalrous and so brilliant, or because they would not be crowed over, clapped their ten thousand hands as loudly, and thus thundering, heart-thrilling salvo of applause answered salvo on both sides of that terrible arena.

That evening came a courteous and flattering message from the commander-in-chief to Colonel Dujardin; and several officers visited his quarters to look at him; they went back disappointed. The cry was, "What a miserable, melancholy dog! I expected to see a fine, dashing fellow."

The trenches neared the town. Colonel Dujardin's mine was far advanced; the end of the chamber was within a few yards of the bastion. Of late, the colonel had often visited this mine in person. He seemed a little uneasy about something in that quarter; but no one knew what: he was a silent man. The third evening, after he dismounted Long Tom, he received private notice that an order was coming down from the commander-in-chief to assault the bastion. He shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing. That same night the colonel and one of his lieutenants stole out of the trenches, and by the help of a pitch-dark, windy night, got under the bastion unperceived, and crept round it, and made their observations, and got safe back. About noon down came General Raimbaut.

"Well, colonel, you are to have your way at last. Your bastion is to be stormed this afternoon previous to the general assault. Why, how is this? you don't seem enchanted?"

"I am not."

"Why, it was you who pressed for the assault."

"At the right time, general, not the wrong. In five days I undertake to blow that bastion into the air. To assault it now would be to waste our men."

General Raimbaut thought this excess of caution a great piece of perversity in Achilles. They were alone, and he said a little peevishly,--

"Is not this to blow hot and cold on the same thing?"

"No, general," was the calm reply. "Not on the same thing. I blew hot upon timorous counsels; I blow cold on rash ones. General, last night Lieutenant Fleming and I were under that bastion; and all round it."

"Ah! my prudent colonel, I thought we should not talk long without your coming out in your true light. If ever a man secretly enjoyed risking his life, it is you."

"No, general," said Dujardin looking gloomily down; "I enjoy neither that nor anything else. Live or die, it is all one to me; but to the lives of my soldiers I am not indifferent, and never will be while I live. My apparent rashness of last night was pure prudence."

Raimbaut's eye twinkled with suppressed irony. "No doubt!" said he; "no doubt!"

The impassive colonel would not notice the other's irony; he went calmly on:--

"I suspected something; I went to confute, or confirm that suspicion. I confirmed it."

Rat! tat! tat! tat! tat! tat! tat! was heard a drum. Relieving guard in the mine.

Colonel Dujardin interrupted himself.

"That comes apropos," said he. "I expect one proof more from that quarter. Sergeant, send me the sentinel they are relieving."

Sergeant La Croix soon came back, as pompous as a hen with one chick, predominating with a grand military air over a droll figure that chattered with cold, and held its musket in hands clothed in great mittens. Dard.

La Croix marched him up as if he had been a file; halted him like a file, sang out to him as to a file, stentorian and unintelligible, after the manner of sergeants.

"Private No. 4."

Dard P-p-p-present!

La Croix. Advance to the word of command, and speak to the colonel.

The shivering figure became an upright statue directly, and carried one of his mittens to his forehead. Then, suddenly recognizing the rank of the gray-haired officer, he was morally shaken, but remained physically erect, and stammered,--

"Colonel!--general!--colonel!"

"Don't be frightened, my lad. But look at the general and answer me."

"Yes! general! colonel!" and he levelled his eye dead at the general, as he would a bayonet at a foe, being so commanded.

"Now answer in as few syllables as you can."

"Yes! general--colonel."

"You have been on guard in the mine."

"Yes, general."

"What did you see there?"

"Nothing; it was night down there."

"What did you feel?"

"Cold! I--was--in--water--hugh!"

"Did you hear nothing, then?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"Bum! bum! bum!"

"Are you sure you did not hear particles of earth fall at the end of the trench?"

"I think it did, and this (touching his musket) sounded of its own accord."

"Good! you have answered well; go."

"Sergeant, I did not miss a word," cried Dard, exulting. He thought he had passed a sort of military college examination. The sergeant was awe-struck and disgusted at his familiarity, speaking to him before the great: he pushed Private Dard hastily out of the presence, and bundled him into the trenches.

"Are you countermined, then?" asked General Raimbaut.

"I think not, general; but the whole bastion is. And we found it had been opened in the rear, and lately half a dozen broad roads cut through the masonry."

"To let in re-enforcements?"

"Or to let the men run out in ease of an assault. I have seen from the first an able hand behind that part of the defences. If we assault the bastion, they will pick off as many of us as they can with their muskets then they will run for it, and fire a train, and blow it and us into the air."

"Colonel, this is serious. Are you prepared to lay this statement before the commander-in-chief?"

"I am, and I do so through you, the general of my division. I even beg you to say, as from me, that the assault will be mere suicide-- bloody and useless."

General Raimbaut went off to headquarters in some haste, a thorough convert to Colonel Dujardin's opinion. Meantime the colonel went slowly to his tent. At the mouth of it a corporal, who was also his body-servant, met him, saluted, and asked respectfully if there were any orders.

"A few minutes' repose, Francois, that is all. Do not let me be disturbed for an hour."

"Attention!" cried Francois. "Colonel wants to sleep."

The tent was sentinelled, and Dujardin was alone with the past.

Then had the fools, that took (as fools will do) deep sorrow for sullenness, seen the fiery soldier droop, and his wan face fall into haggard lines, and his martial figure shrink, and heard his stout heart sigh! He took a letter from his bosom: it was almost worn to pieces. He had read it a thousand times, yet he read it again. A part of the sweet sad words ran thus:--

"We must bow. We can never be happy together on earth; let us make Heaven our friend. This is still left us,--not to blush for our love; to do our duty, and to die."

"How tender, but how firm," thought Camille. "I might agitate, taunt, grieve her I love, but I could not shake her. No! God and the saints to my aid! they saved me from a crime I now shudder at. And they have given me the good chaplain: he prays with me, he weeps for me. His prayers still my beating heart. Yes, poor suffering angel! I read your will in these tender, but bitter, words: you prefer duty to love. And one day you will forget me; not yet awhile, but it will be so. It wounds me when I think of it, but I must bow. Your will is sacred. I must rise to your level, not drag you to mine."

Then the soldier that had stood between two armies in a hail of bullets, and fired a master-shot, took a little book of offices in one hand,--the chaplain had given it him,--and fixed his eyes upon the pious words, and clung like a child to the pious words, and kissed his lost wife's letter, and tried hard to be like her he loved: patient, very patient, till the end should come.

"Qui vive?" cried the sentinel outside to a strange officer.

"France," was his reply. He then asked the sentinel, "Where is the colonel commanding the brigade?"

The sentinel lowered his voice, "Asleep, my officer," said he; for the new-comer carried two epaulets.

"Wake him," said the officer in a tone of a man used to command on a large scale.

Dujardin heard, and did not choose a stranger should think he was asleep in broad day. He came hastily out of the tent, therefore, with Josephine's letter in his hand, and, in the very act of conveying it to his bosom, found himself face to face with--her husband.

Did you ever see two duellists cross rapiers?

How unlike a theatrical duel! How smooth and quiet the bright blades are! they glide into contact. They are polished and slippery, yet they hold each other. So these two men's eyes met, and fastened: neither spoke: each searched the other's face keenly. Raynal's countenance, prepared as he was for this meeting, was like a stern statue's. The other's face flushed, and his heart raged and sickened at sight of the man, that, once his comrade and benefactor, was now possessor of the woman he loved. But the figures of both stood alike haughty, erect, and immovable, face to face.

Colonel Raynal saluted Colonel Dujardin ceremoniously. Colonel Dujardin returned the salute in the same style.

"You thought I was in Egypt," said Raynal with grim significance that caught Dujardin's attention, though he did not know quite how to interpret it.

He answered mechanically, "Yes, I did."

"I am sent here by General Bonaparte to take a command," explained Raynal.

"You are welcome. What command?"

"Yours."

"Mine?" cried Dujardin, his forehead flushing with mortification and anger. "What, is it not enough that you take my"-- He stopped then.

"Come, colonel," said the other calmly, "do not be unjust to an old comrade. I take your demi-brigade; but you are promoted to Raimbaut's brigade. The exchange is to be made to-morrow."

"Was it then to announce to me my promotion you came to my quarters?" and Camille looked with a strange mixture of feelings at his old comrade.

"That was the first thing, being duty, you know."

"What? have you anything else to say to me, then?"

"I have."

"Is it important? for my own duties will soon demand me."

"It is so important that, command or no command, I should have come further than the Rhine to say it to you."

Let a man be as bold as a lion, a certain awe still waits upon doubt and mystery; and some of this vague awe crept over Camille Dujardin at Raynal's mysterious speech, and his grave, quiet, significant manner.

Had he discovered something, and what? For Josephine's sake, more than his own, Camille was on his guard directly.

Raynal looked at him in silence a moment.

"What?" said he with a slight sneer, "has it never occurred to you that I MUST have a serious word to say to you? First, let me put you a question: did they treat you well at my house? at the chateau de Beaurepaire?"

"Yes," faltered Camille.

"You met, I trust, all the kindness and care due to a wounded soldier and an officer of merit. It would annoy me greatly if I thought you were not treated like a brother in my house."

Colonel Dujardin writhed inwardly at this view of matters. He could not reply in few words. This made him hesitate.

His inquisitor waited, but, receiving no reply, went on, "Well, colonel, have you shown the sense of gratitude we had a right to look for in return? In a word, when you left Beaurepaire, had your conscience nothing to reproach you with?"

Dujardin still hesitated. He scarcely knew what to think or what to say. But he thought to himself, "Who has told him? does he know all?"

"Colonel Dujardin, I am the husband of Josephine, the son of Madame de Beaurepaire, and the brother of Rose. You know very well what brings me here. Your answer?"

"Colonel Raynal, between men of honor, placed as you and I are, few words should pass, for words are idle. You will never prove to me that I have wronged you: I shall never convince you that I have not. Let us therefore close this painful interview in the way it is sure to close. I am at your service, at any hour and place you please."

"And pray is that all the answer you can think of?" asked Raynal somewhat scornfully.

"Why, what other answer can I give you?"

"A more sensible, a more honest, and a less boyish one. Who doubts that you can fight, you silly fellow? haven't I seen you? I want you to show me a much higher sort of courage: the courage to repair a wrong, not the paltry valor to defend one."

"I really do not understand you, sir. How can I undo what is done?"

"Why, of course you cannot. And therefore I stand here ready to forgive all that is past; not without a struggle, which you don't seem to appreciate."

Camille was now utterly mystified. Raynal continued, "But of course it is upon condition that you consent to heal the wound you have made. If you refuse--hum! but you will not refuse."

"But what is it you require of me?" inquired Camille impatiently.

"Only a little common honesty. This is the case: you have seduced a young lady."

"Sir!" cried Camille angrily.

"What is the matter? The word is not so bad as the crime, I take it. You have seduced her, and under circumstances-- But we won't speak of them, because I am resolved to keep cool. Well, sir, as you said just now, it's no use crying over spilled milk; you can't unseduce the little fool; so you must marry her."

"M--m--marry her?" and Dujardin flushed all over, and his heart beat, and he stared in Raynal's face.

"Why, what is the matter again? If she has played the fool, it was with you, and no other man: it is not as if she was depraved. Come, my lad, show a little generosity! Take the consequences of your own act--or your share of it--don't throw it all on the poor feeble woman. If she has loved you too much, you are the man of all others that should forgive her. Come, what do you say?"

This was too much for Camille; that Raynal should come and demand of him to marry his own wife, for so he understood the proposal. He stared at Raynal in silence ever so long, and even when he spoke it was only to mutter, "Are you out of your senses, or am I?"

At this it cost Raynal a considerable effort to restrain his wrath. However, he showed himself worthy of the office he had undertaken. He contained himself, and submitted to argue the matter. "Why, colonel," said he, "is it such a misfortune to marry poor Rose? She is young, she is lovely, she has many good qualities, and she would have walked straight to the end of her days but for you."

Now here was another surprise for Dujardin, another mystification.

"Rose de Beaurepaire?" said he, putting his hand to his head, as if to see whether his reason was still there.

"Yes, Rose de Beaurepaire--Rose Dujardin that ought to be, and that is to be, if you please."

"One word, monsieur: is it of Rose we have been talking all this time?"

Raynal nearly lost his temper at this question, and the cold, contemptuous tone with which it was put; but he gulped down his ire.

"It is," said he.

"One question more. Did she tell you I had--I had"--

"Why, as to that, she was in no condition to deny she had fallen, poor girl; the evidence was too strong. She did not reveal her seducer's name; but I had not far to go for that."

"One question more," said Dujardin, with a face of anguish. "Is it Jos--is it Madame Raynal's wish I should marry her sister?"

"Why, of course," said Raynal, in all sincerity, assuming that naturally enough as a matter of course; "if you have any respect for HER feelings, look on me as her envoy in this matter."

At this Camille turned sick with disgust; then rage and bitterness swelled his heart. A furious impulse seized him to expose Josephine on the spot. He overcame that, however, and merely said, "She wishes me to marry her sister, does she? very well then, I decline."

Raynal was shocked. "Oh," said he, sorrowfully, "I cannot believe this of you; such heartlessness as this is not written in your face; it is contradicted by your past actions."

"I refuse," said Dujardin, hastily; and to tell the truth, not sorry to inflict some pain on the honest soldier who had unintentionally driven the iron so deep into his own soul.

"And I," said Raynal, losing his temper, "insist, in the name of my dear Josephine"--

"Perdition!" snarled Dujardin, losing his self-command in turn.

"And of the whole family."

"And I tell you I will never marry her. Upon my honor, never."

"Your honor! you have none. The only question is would you rather marry her--or die."

"Die, to be sure."

"Then die you shall."

"Ah!" said Dujardin; "did I not tell you we were wasting time?

"Let us waste no more then. When and where?"

"At the rear of the commander-in-chief's tent; when you like."

"This afternoon, then--at five."

"At five."

"Seconds?"

"What for?"

"You are right. They are only in the way of men who carry sabres; and besides the less gossip the better. Good-by, till five," and the two saluted one another with grim ceremony; and Raynal turned on his heel.

Camille stood transfixed; a fierce, guilty joy throbbed in his heart. His rival had quarrelled with him, had insulted him, had challenged him. It was not his fault. The sun shone bright now upon his cold despair. An hour ago life offered nothing. A few hours more, and then joy beyond expression, or an end of all. Death or Josephine! Then he remembered that this very Josephine wished to marry him to Rose. Then he remembered Raynal had saved his life. Cold chills crossed his breaking heart. Of all that could happen to him death alone seemed a blessing without alloy.

He stood there so torn with conflicting passions, that he noted neither the passing hours nor the flying bullets.

He was only awakened from his miserable trance by the even tread of soldiers marching towards him; he looked up and there were several officers coming along the edge of the trench, escorted by a corporal's guard.

He took a step or two to meet them. After the usual salutes, one of the three colonels delivered a large paper, with a large seal, to Dujardin. He read it out to his captains and lieutenants, who had assembled at sight of the cocked hats and full uniforms.

"Attack by the army to-morrow upon all the lines. Attack of the bastion St. Andre this evening. The 22d, the 24th, and 12th brigades will furnish the contingents; the operation will be conducted by one of the colonels of the second division, to be appointed by General Raimbaut."

"Aha!" sounded a voice like a trombone at the reader's elbow. "I am just in the nick of time. When, colonel, when?"

"At five this evening, Colonel Raynal."

"There," said Raynal, in a half-whisper, to Dujardin; "could they choose no hour but that?"

"Do not be uneasy," replied Dujardin, under his breath. He explained aloud--"the assault will not take place, gentlemen; the bastion is mined."

"What of that? half of them are mined. We will take our engineers in with us," said Raynal.

"Such an assault will be a useless massacre," resumed Dujardin. "I reconnoitred the bastion last night, and saw their preparations for blowing us to the devil; and General Raimbaut, at my request, is even now presenting my remarks to the commander-in-chief, and enforcing them. There will be no assault. In a day or two we shall blow the bastion, mines, and all into the air."

At this moment Raynal caught sight of a gray-haired officer coming at some distance. "There is General Raimbaut," said he. "I will go and pay my respects to him." General Raimbaut shook his hand warmly, and welcomed him to the army. They were old and warm friends. "And you are come at the right time," said he. "It will soon be as hot here as in Egypt."

Raynal laughed and said all the better.

General Raimbaut now joined the group of officers, and entered at once in the business which had brought him. Addressing himself to Colonel Dujardin, first he informs that officer he had presented his observations to the commander-in-chief, who had given them the attention they merited.

Colonel Dujardin bowed.

"But," continued General Raimbaut, "they are overruled by imperious circumstances, some of which he did not reveal; they remain in his own breast. However, on the eve of a general attack, which he cannot postpone, that bastion must be disarmed, otherwise it would be too fatal to all the storming parties. It is a painful necessity." He added, "Tell Colonel Dujardin I count greatly on the courage and discipline of his brigade, and on his own wise measures."

Colonel Dujardin bowed. Then he whispered in the other's ear, "Both will alike be wasted."

The other colonels waved their hats in triumph at the commander-in-chief's decision, and Raynal's face showed he looked on Dujardin as a sort of spoil-sport happily defeated.

"Well, then, gentlemen," said General Raimbaut, "we begin by settling the contingents to be furnished by your several brigades. Say, an equal number from each. The sum total shall be settled by Colonel Dujardin, who has so long and ably baffled the bastion at this post."

Colonel Dujardin bowed stiffly and not very graciously. In his heart he despised these old fogies, compounds of timidity and rashness.

"So, how many men in all, colonel?" asked General Raimbaut.

"The fewer the better," replied the other solemnly, "since"--and then discipline tied his tongue.

"I understand you," said the old man. "Shall we say eight hundred men?"

"I should prefer three hundred. They have made a back door to the bastion, and the means of flight at hand will put flight into their heads. They will pick off some of our men as we go at them. When the rest jump in they will jump out, and"-- He paused.

"Why, he knows all about it before it comes," said one of the colonels naively.

"I do. I see the whole operation and its result before me, as I see this hand. Three hundred men will do."

"But, general," objected Raynal, "you are not beginning at the beginning. The first thing in these cases is to choose the officer to command the storming party."

"Yes, Raynal, unquestionably; but you must be aware that is a painful and embarrassing part of my duty, especially after Colonel Dujardin's remarks."

"Ah, bah!" cried Raynal. "He is prejudiced. He has been digging a thundering long mine here, and now you are going to make his child useless. We none of us like that. But when he gets the colors in his hand, and the storming column at his back, his misgivings will all go to the wind, and the enemy after them, unless he has been committing some crime, and is very much changed from what I knew him four years ago."

"Colonel Raynal," said one of the other colonels, politely but firmly, "pray do not assume that Colonel Dujardin is to lead the column; there are three other claimants. General Raimbaut is to select from us four."

"Yes, gentlemen, and in a service of this kind I would feel grateful to you all if you would relieve me of that painful duty."

"Gentlemen," said Dujardin, with an imperceptible sneer, "the general means to say this: the operation is so glorious that he could hardly without partiality assign the command to either of us four claimants. Well, then, let us cast lots."

The proposal was received by acclamation.

"The general will mark a black cross on one lot, and he who draws it wins the command."

The young colonels prepared their lots with almost boyish eagerness. These fiery spirits were sick to death of lying and skulking in the trenches. They flung their lots into the hat. After them, who should approach the hat, lot in hand, but Raynal. Dujardin instantly interfered, and held his arm as he was in the act of dropping in his lot.

"What is the matter?" said Raynal, sharply.

"This is our affair, Colonel Raynal. You have no command in this army."

"I beg your pardon, sir, I have yours."

"Not till to-morrow."

"Why, you would not take such a pettifogging advantage of an old comrade as that."

"Tell him the day ends at twelve o'clock," said one of the colonels interested by this strange strife.

"Ah!" cried Raynal, triumphantly; "but no," said he, altering his tone, "let us leave that sort of argument to lawyers. I have come a good many miles to fight with you, general; and now you must decide to pay me this little compliment on my arrival, or put a bitter affront on me--choose!"

While the old general hesitated, Camille replied, "Since you take that tone there can be but one answer. You are too great a credit to the French army for even an apparent slight to be put on you here. The rule, I think, is, that one of the privates shall hold the hat.--Hallo! Private Dard, come here--there--hold this hat."

"Yes, colonel.--Lord, here is my young mistress's husband!"

"Silence!"

And they began to draw, and, in the act of drawing, a change of manner was first visible in these gay and ardent spirits.

"It is not I," said one, throwing away his lot.

"Nor I."

"It is I," said Raynal; then with sudden gravity, "I am the lucky one."

And now that the honor and the danger no longer floated vaguely over four heads, but had fixed on one, a sudden silence and solemnity took the place of eager voices.

It was first broken by Private Dard saying, with foolish triumph, "And I held the hat for you, colonel."

"Ah, Raynal!" said General Raimbaut, sorrowfully, "it was not worth while to come from Egypt for this."

Raynal made no reply to this. He drew out his watch, and said calmly, he had no time to lose; he must inspect the detachments he was to command. "Besides," said he, "I have some domestic arrangements to make. Hitherto on these occasions I was a bachelor, now I am married." General Raimbaut could not help sighing. Raynal read this aright, and turned to him, "A droll marriage, my old friend; I'll tell you all about it if ever I have the time. It began with a purchase, general, and ends with--with a bequest, which I might as well write now, and so have nothing to think of but duty afterwards. Where can I write?"

"Colonel Dujardin will lend you his tent, I am sure."

"Certainly."

"And, messieurs," said Raynal, "if I waste time you need not. You can pick me my men from your brigades. Give me a strong spice of old hands."

The colonels withdrew on this, and General Raimbaut walked sadly and thoughtfully towards the battery. Dujardin and Raynal were left alone.

"This postpones our affair, sir."

"Yes, Raynal."

"Have you writing materials in your tent?"

"Yes; on the table."

"You are quite sure the bastion is mined, comrade?"

This unexpected word and Raynal's gentle appeal touched Dujardin deeply. It was in a broken voice he replied that he was unfortunately too sure of it.

Raynal received this reply as a sentence of death, and without another word walked slowly into Dujardin's tent.

Dujardin's generosity was up in arms; he followed Raynal, and said eagerly, "Raynal, for Heaven's sake resign this command!"

"Allow me to write to my wife, colonel," was the cold reply.

Camille winced at this affront, and drew back a moment; but his nobler part prevailed. He seized Raynal by the wrist. "You shall not affront me, you cannot affront me. You go to certain death I tell you, if you attack that bastion."

"Don't be a fool, colonel," said Raynal: "somebody must lead the men."

"Yes; but not you. Who has so good a right to lead them as I, their colonel?"

"And be killed in my place, eh?"

"I know the ground better than you," said Camille. "Besides, who cares for me? I have no friends, no family. But you are married-- and so many will mourn if you"--

Raynal interrupted him sternly. "You forget, sir, that Rose de Beaurepaire is my sister, when you tell me you have no tie to life." He added, with wonderful dignity and sobriety, "Allow me to write to my wife, sir; and, while I write, reflect that you can embitter an old comrade's last moments by persisting in your refusal to restore his sister the honor you have robbed her of."

And leaving the other staggered and confused by this sudden blow, he retired into Dujardin's tent, and finding writing materials on a little table that was there, sat down to pen a line to Josephine.

Camille knew to whom he was writing, and a jealous pang passed through him.

What he wrote ran thus,--

"A bastion is to be attacked at five. I command. Colonel Dujardin proposed we should draw lots, and I lost. The service is honorable, but the result may, I fear, give you some pain. My dear wife, it is our fate. I was not to have time to make you know, and perhaps love me. God bless you."

In writing these simple words, Raynal's hard face worked, and his mustache quivered, and once he had to clear his eye with his hand to form the letters. He, the man of iron.

He who stood there, leaning on his scabbard and watching the writer, saw this, and it stirred all that was great and good in that grand though passionate heart of his.

"Poor Raynal!" thought he, "you were never like that before on going into action. He is loath to die. Ay, and it is a coward's trick to let him die. I shall have her, but shall I have her esteem? What will the army say? What will my conscience say? Oh! I feel already it will gnaw my heart to death; the ghost of that brave fellow--once my dear friend, my rival now, by no fault of his--will rise between her and me, and reproach me with my bloody inheritance. The heart never deceives; I feel it now whispering in my ear: 'Skulking captain, white-livered soldier, that stand behind a parapet while a better man does your work! you assassinate the husband, but the rival conquers you.' There, he puts his hand to his eyes. What shall I do?"

"Colonel," said a low voice, and at the same time a hand was laid on his shoulder.

It was General Raimbaut. The general looked pale and distressed.

"Come apart, colonel, for Heaven's sake! One word, while he is writing. Ah! that was an unlucky idea of yours."

"Of mine, general?"

"'Twas you proposed to cast lots."

"Good God! so it was."

"I thought of course it was to be managed so that Raynal should not be the one. Between ourselves, what honorable excuse can we make?"

"None, general."

"The whole division will be disgraced, and forgive me if I say a portion of the discredit will fall on you."

"Help me to avert that shame then," cried Camille, eagerly.

"Ah! that I will: but how?"

"Take your pencil and write--'I authorize Colonel Dujardin to save the honor of the colonels of the second division.'"

The general hesitated. He had never seen an order so worded. But at last he took out his pencil and wrote the required order, after his own fashion; i.e., in milk and water:--

On account of the singular ability and courage with which Colonel Dujardin has conducted the operations against the Bastion St. Andre, a discretionary power is given him at the moment of assault to carry into effect such measures, as, without interfering with the commander-in-chief's order, may sustain his own credit, and that of the other colonels of the second division.

RAIMBAUT, General of Division.

Camille put the paper into his bosom.

"Now, general, you may leave all to me. I swear to you, Raynal shall not die--shall not lead this assault."

"Your hand, colonel. You are an honor to the French armies. How will you do it?"

"Leave it to me, general, it shall be done."

"I feel it will, my noble fellow: but, alas! I fear not without risking some valuable life or other, most likely your own. Tell me!"

"General, I decline."

"You refuse me, sir?"

"Yes; this order gives me a discretionary power. I will hand back the order at your command; but modify it I will not. Come, sir, you veteran generals have been unjust to me, and listened to me too little all through this siege, but at last you have honored me. This order is the greatest honor that was ever done me since I wore a sword."

"My poor colonel!"

"Let me wear it intact, and carry it to my grave."

"Say no more! One word--Is there anything on earth I can do for you, my brave soldier?"

"Yes, general. Be so kind as to retire to your quarters; there are reasons why you ought not to be near this post in half an hour."

"I go. Is there nothing else?"

"Well, general, ask the good priest Ambrose, to pray for all those who shall die doing their duty to their country this afternoon."

They parted. General Raimbaut looked back more than once at the firm, intrepid figure that stood there unflinching, on the edge of the grave. But he never took his eye off Raynal. The next minute the sad letter was finished, and Raynal walked out of the tent, and confronted the man he had challenged to single combat.

I have mentioned elsewhere that Colonel Dujardin had eyes strangely compounded of battle and love, of the dove and the hawk. And these, softened by a noble act he meditated, now rested on Raynal with a strange expression of warmth and goodness. This strange gaze struck Raynal, so far at least as this; he saw it was no hostile eye. He was glad of that, for his own heart was calmed and softened by the solemn prospect before him.

"We, too, have a little account to settle before I order out the men," said he, calmly, "and I can't give you a long credit. I am pressed for time."

"Our quarrel is at an end. When duty sounds the recall, a soldier's heart leaves private feuds. See! I come to you without anger and ill-will. Just now my voice was loud, my manner, I dare say, offensive, and menacing even, and that always tempts a brave fellow like you to resist. But now, you see, I am harmless as a woman. We are alone. Humbug to the winds! I know that you are the only man in this army fit to command a division. I know that when you say the assault of that bastion is death, death it is. To the point then; now that my manner is no longer irritating, now that I am going to die, Camille Dujardin, my old comrade, have you the heart to refuse me? am I to die unhappy?"

"No; no: I will do whatever you like."

"You will marry that poor girl, then?"

"Yes."

"Aha! did not I always say he was a good fellow? Clench the nail; give me your honor."

"I give you my honor to marry her, if I live."

"You take a load off me; may Heaven reward you. In one hour those poor women, whose support I had promised to be, will lose their protector; but I give them another in you. We shall not leave that family in tears, Rose in shame, and your child without a name."

Dujardin stared at the speaker. What new and devilish deception was this?

"My child!" he faltered. "What child?"

"Ah," said Raynal, "what a fool I was! That is the first thing I ought to have told you. Poor little fellow! I surprised him in his cradle; his mother and Josephine were rocking him, and singing over him. Oh! it was a scene, I can tell you. My poor wife had been ill for some time, and was so weakened by it, that I frightened her into a fit, stealing a march on her that way. She fainted away. Perhaps it is as well she did; for I--I did not know what to think; it looked ugly; but while she lay at our feet insensible, I forced the truth from Rose; she owned the boy was hers."

While Raynal told him this strange story, Camille turned hot and cold. First came a thrill of glowing joy; he had some clew to all this: he was a father; that child was Josephine's and his; the next moment he froze within. So Josephine had not only gulled her husband, but him, too; she had refused him the sad consolation of knowing he had a child. Cruelty, calculation, and baseness unexampled! Here was a creature who could sacrifice anything and anybody to her comfort, to the peace and sordid smoothness of her domestic life. She stood between two men--a thing. Between two truths--a double lie.

His heart, in one moment, turned against her like a stone. A musket-bullet through the body does not turn life to death quicker than Raynal turned his rival's love to despair and scorn: that love which neither wounds, absence, prison, nor even her want of constancy had prevailed to shake.

"Out of my bosom!" he cried--"out of it, in this world and the next!"

He forgot, in his lofty rage, who stood beside him.

"What?--what?" cried Raynal.

"No matter," said Camille; "only I esteem YOU, Raynal. You are truth; you are a man, and deserve a better lot."

"Don't say that," replied Raynal, quite misunderstanding him. "It is a soldier's end: I never desired nor hoped a better: only, of course, I feel sad. You are a happy fellow, to have a child and to live to see it, and her you love."

"Oh, yes, I am very happy," replied the poor fellow, his lip quivering.

"Watch over all those poor women, comrade, and sometimes speak to them of me. It is foolish, but we like to be remembered."

"Yes! but do not let us speak of that. Raynal, you and I were lieutenants together; do you remember saving my life in the Arno?"

"Yes."

"Then promise me, if you should live, to remember not our quarrel of to-day, nor anything; but only those early days, and this afternoon."

"I do."

"Your hand, comrade."

"There, comrade, there."

They wrung one another's hands, and turned away and hid their faces from each other, for their eyes were moist.

"This won't do, comrade, I must go. I shall attack from your position. So I shall go down the line, and bring the men up. Meantime, pick me your detachment. Give me a good spice of veterans. I shall get one word with you before we go out. God bless you!"

"God bless you, Raynal!"

The moment Raynal was gone, Camille beckoned a lieutenant to him, and ordered half the brigade to form in a strong column on both sides Death's Alley.

His eye fell upon private Dard, as luck would have it. "Come here," said he. Dard came and saluted.

"Have you anybody at Beaurepaire that would be sorry if you were killed?"

"Yes, colonel! Jacintha, that used to make your broth, colonel."

"Take this line to Colonel Raynal. You will find him with the 12th brigade."

He wrote a few lines in pencil, folded them, and Dard went off with them, little dreaming that the colonel of his brigade was taking the trouble to save his life, because he came from Beaurepaire. Colonel Dujardin then went into his tent, and closed the aperture, and took the good book the priest had given him, and prayed humbly, and forgave all the world.

Then he sat down, his head in his hands, and thought of his child, and how hard it was he must die and never see him. Then he lighted a candle, and sealed up his orders of valor, and wrote a line, begging that they might be sent to his sister. He also sealed up his purse, and left a memorandum that the contents should be given to disabled soldiers of his brigade upon their being invalided.

Then he took out Josephine's letter. "Poor coward," he said, "let me not be unkind. See, I burn your letter, lest it should be found, and disturb the peace you prize so highly. I, too, shall soon be at peace." He lighted the letter, and dropped it on the ground: it burned slowly away. He eyed it, despairingly. "Ay," said he, "you perish, last record of an unhappy love: and even so pass away my life; my hopes of glory, and my dreams of love; it all ends to-day: at nine and twenty."

He put his white handkerchief to his eyes. Josephine had given it him. He cried a little.

When he had done crying, he put his white handkerchief in his bosom, and the whole man was transformed beyond language to express. Powder does not change more when it catches fire. He rose that moment and went like a flash of lightning out of the tent. The next, he came down between the lines of the strong column that stood awaiting orders in Death's Alley.

"Attention!" cried the sergeants; "the colonel!"

There was a dead silence, for the bare sight of that erect and inspired figure made the men's bosoms thrill with the certainty of great deeds to come: the light of battle was in his eye. No longer the moody colonel, but a thunderbolt of war, red-hot, and waiting to be launched.

"Officers, sergeants, soldiers, a word with you!"

La Croix. Attention!

"Do you know what passed here five minutes ago?"

"The attack of the bastion was settled!" cried a captain.

"It was; and who was to lead the assault? do you know that?"

"No."

"A colonel from Egypt."

At that there was a groan from the men.

"With detachments from the other brigades."

"Ah!" an angry roar.

Colonel Dujardin walked quickly down between the two lines, looking with his fiery eye into the men's eyes on his right. Then he came back on the other side, and, as he went, he lighted those men's eyes with his own. It was a torch passing along a line of ready gas-lights.

"The work to us!" he cried in a voice like a clarion (it fired the hearts as his eye had fired the eyes)--"The triumph to strangers! Our fatigues and our losses have not gained the brigade the honor of going out at those fellows that have killed so many of our comrades."

A fierce groan broke from the men.

"What! shall the colors of another brigade and not ours fly from that bastion this afternoon?"

"No! no!" in a roar like thunder.

"Ah! you are of my mind. Attention! the attack is fixed for five o'clock. Suppose you and I were to carry the bastion ten minutes before the colonel from Egypt can bring his men upon the ground."

At this there was a fierce burst of joy and laughter; the strange laughter of veterans and born invincibles. Then a yell of exulting assent, accompanied by the thunder of impatient drums, and the rattle of fixing bayonets.

The colonel told off a party to the battery.

"Level the guns at the top tier. Fire at my signal, and keep firing over our heads, till you see our colors on the place."

He then darted to the head of the column, which instantly formed behind him in the centre of Death's Alley.

"The colors! No hand but mine shall hold them to-day."

They were instantly brought him: his left hand shook them free in the afternoon sun.

A deep murmur of joy rolled out from the old hands at the now unwonted sight. Out flashed the colonel's sword like steel lightning. He pointed to the battery.

Bang! bang! bang! bang! went his cannon, and the smoke rolled over the trenches. At the same moment up went the colors waving, and the colonel's clarion voice pealed high above all:--

"Twenty-fourth brigade--Forward!"

They went so swiftly out of the trenches that they were not seen through their own smoke until they had run some sixty yards. As soon as they were seen, coming on like devils through their own smoke, two thousand muskets were levelled at them from the Prussian line. It was not a rattle of small arms--it was a crash, and the men fell fast: but in a moment they were seen to spread out like a fan, and to offer less mark, and when the fan closed again, it half encircled the bastion. It was a French attack: part swarmed at it in front like bees, part swept round the glacis and flanked it. They were seen to fall in numbers, shot down from the embrasures. But the living took the place of the dead: and the fight ranged evenly there. Where are the colors? Towards the rear there. The colonel and a hundred men are fighting hand to hand with the Prussians, who have charged out at the back doors of the bastion. Success there, and the bastion must fall--both sides know this.

The colors disappeared. There was a groan from the French lines. The colors reappeared, and close under the bastion.

And now in front the attack was so hot, that often the Prussian gunners were seen to jump down, driven from their posts; and the next moment a fierce hurrah from the rear told that the French had won some great advantage there. The fire slackening told a similar tale and presently down came the Prussian flag-staff. That might be an accident. A few moments of thirsting expectation, and up went the colors of the 24th brigade upon the Bastion St. Andre.

The French army raised a shout that rent the sky, and their cannon began to play on the Prussian lines and between the bastion and the nearest fort, to prevent a recapture.

Sudden there shot from the bastion a cubic acre of fire: it carried up a heavy mountain of red and black smoke that looked solid as marble. There was a heavy, sullen, tremendous explosion that snuffed out the sound of the cannon, and paralyzed the French and Prussian gunners' hands, and checked the very beating of their hearts. Thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder were in that awful explosion. War itself held its breath, and both armies, like peaceable spectators, gazed wonder-struck, terror-struck. Great hell seemed to burst through the earth's crust, and to be rushing at heaven. Huge stones, cannons, corpses, and limbs of soldiers, were seen driven or falling through the smoke. Some of these last came quite clear of the ruins, ay, into the French and Prussian lines, that even the veterans put their hands to their eyes. Raynal felt something patter on him from the sky--it was blood--a comrade's perhaps.

The smoke cleared. Where, a moment before, the great bastion stood and fought, was a monstrous pile of blackened, bloody stones and timbers, with dismounted cannon sticking up here and there.

And, rent and crushed to atoms beneath the smoking mass, lay the relics of the gallant brigade, and their victorious colors.

A few wounded soldiers of the brigade lay still till dusk. Then they crept back to the trenches. These had all been struck down or disabled short of the bastion. Of those that had taken the place no one came home.

Raynal, after the first stupefaction, pressed hard and even angrily for an immediate assault on the whole Prussian line. Not they. It was on paper that the assault should be at daybreak to-morrow. Such leaders as they were cannot improvise.

Rage and grief in his heart, Raynal waited chafing in the trenches till five minutes past midnight. He then became commander of the brigade, gave his orders, and took thirty men out to creep up to the wreck of the bastion, and find the late colonel's body.

Going for so pious a purpose, he was rewarded by an important discovery. The whole Prussian lines had been abandoned since sunset, and, mounting cautiously on the ramparts, Raynal saw the town too was evacuated, and lights and other indications on a rising ground behind it convinced him that the Prussians were in full retreat, probably to effect that junction with other forces which the assault he had recommended would have rendered impossible.

They now lighted lanterns, and searched all over and round the bastion for the poor colonel, in the rear of the bastion they found many French soldiers, most of whom had died by the bayonet. The Prussian dead had all been carried off.

Here they found the talkative Sergeant La Croix. The poor fellow was silent enough now. A terrible sabre-cut on the skull. The colonel was not there. Raynal groaned, and led the way on to the bastion. The ruins still smoked. Seven or eight bodies were discovered by an arm or a foot protruding through the masses of masonry. Of these some were Prussians; a proof that some devoted hand had fired the train, and destroyed both friend and foe.

They found the tube of Long Tom sticking up, just as he had shown over the battlements that glorious day, with this exception, that a great piece was knocked off his lip, and the slice ended in a long, broad crack.

The soldiers looked at this. "That is our bullet's work," said they. Then one old veteran touched his cap, and told Raynal gravely, he knew where their beloved colonel was. "Dig here, to the bottom," said he. "He lies beneath his work."

Improbable and superstitious as this was, the hearts of the soldiers assented to it.

Presently there was a joyful cry outside the bastion. A rush was made thither. But it proved to be only Dard, who had discovered that Sergeant La Croix's heart still beat. They took him up carefully, and carried him gently into camp. To Dard's delight the surgeon pronounced him curable. For all that, he was three days insensible, and after that unfit for duty. So they sent him home invalided, with a hundred francs out of the poor colonel's purse.

Raynal reported the evacuation of the place, and that Colonel Dujardin was buried under the bastion, and soon after rode out of the camp.

The words Camille had scratched with a pencil, and sent him from the edge of the grave, were few but striking.

"A dead man takes you once more by the hand. My last thought, thank God, is France. For her sake and mine, Raynal. Go for General Bonaparte. Tell him, from a dying soldier, the Rhine is a river to these generals, but to him a field of glory. He will lay out our lives, not waste them."

There was nothing to hinder Raynal from carrying out this sacred request: for the 24th brigade had ceased to exist: already thinned by hard service, it was reduced to a file or two by the fatal bastion. It was incorporated with the 12th; and Raynal rode heavy at heart to Paris, with a black scarf across his breast.

You see now into what a fatal entanglement two high-minded young ladies were led, step by step, through yielding to the natural foible of their sex--the desire to hide everything painful from those they love, even at the expense of truth.

A nice mess they made of it with their amiable dishonesty. And pray take notice that after the first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them on against their will. It was no small part of all their misery that they longed to get back to truth and could not.

We shall see presently how far they succeeded in that pious object, for the sake of which they first entered on concealments. But first a word is due about one of the victims of their amiable, self-sacrificing lubricity. Edouard Riviere fell in one night, from happiness and confidence, such as till that night be had never enjoyed, to deep and hopeless misery.

He lost that which, to every heart capable of really loving, is the greatest earthly blessing, the woman he adored. But worse than that, he lost those prime treasures of the masculine soul, belief in human goodness, and in female purity. To him no more could there be in nature a candid eye, a virtuous ready-mantling cheek: for frailty and treachery had put on these signs of virtue and nobility. Henceforth, let him live a hundred years, whom could he trust or believe in?

Here was a creature whose virtues seemed to make frailty impossible: treachery, doubly impossible: a creature whose very faults--for faults she had--had seemed as opposite to treachery as her very virtues were. Yet she was all frailty and falsehood.

He passed in that one night of anguish from youth to age. He went about his business like a leaden thing. His food turned tasteless. His life seemed ended. Nothing appeared what it had been. The very landscape seemed cut in stone, and he a stone in the middle of it, and his heart a stone in him. At times, across that heavy heart came gushes of furious rage and bitter mortification; his heart was broken, and his faith was gone, for his vanity had been stabbed as fiercely as his love. "Georges Dandin!" he would cry, "curse her! curse her!" But love and misery overpowered these heats, and froze him to stone again.

The poor boy pined and pined. His clothes hung loose about him; his face was so drawn with suffering, you would not have known him. He hated company. The things he was expected to talk about!--he with his crushed heart. He could not. He would not. He shunned all the world; he went alone like a wounded deer. The good doctor, on his return from Paris, called on him to see if he was ill: since he had not come for days to the chateau. He saw the doctor coming and bade the servant say he was not in the village.

He drew down the blind, that he might never see the chateau again. He drew it up again: he could not exist without seeing it. "She will be miserable, too," he cried, gnashing his teeth. "She will see whether she has chosen well." At other times, all his courage, and his hatred, and his wounded vanity, were drowned in his love and its despair, and then he bowed his head, and sobbed and cried as if his heart would burst. One morning he was so sobbing with his head on the table, when his landlady tapped at his door. He started up and turned his head away from the door.

"A young woman from Beaurepaire, monsieur."

"From Beaurepaire?" his heart gave a furious leap. "Show her in."

He wiped his eyes and seated himself at a table, and, all in a flutter, pretended to be the state's.

It was not Jacintha, as he expected, but the other servant. She made a low reverence, cast a look of admiration on him, and gave him a letter. His eye darted on it: his hand trembled as he took it. He turned away again to open it. He forced himself to say, in a tolerably calm voice, "I will send an answer."

The letter was apparently from the baroness de Beaurepaire; a mere line inviting him to pay her a visit. It was written in a tremulous hand. Edouard examined the writing, and saw directly it was written by Rose.

Being now, naturally enough, full of suspicion, he set this down as an attempt to disguise her hand. "So," said he, to himself, "this is the game. The old woman is to be drawn into it, too. She is to help to make Georges Dandin of me. I will go. I will baffle them all. I will expose this nest of depravity, all ceremony on the surface, and voluptuousness and treachery below. O God! who could believe that creature never loved me! They shall none of them see my weakness. Their benefactor shall be still their superior. They shall see me cold as ice, and bitter as gall."

But to follow him farther just now, would be to run too far in advance of the main story. I must, therefore, return to Beaurepaire, and show, amongst other things, how this very letter came to be written.

When Josephine and Rose awoke from that startled slumber that followed the exhaustion of that troubled night, Rose was the more wretched of the two. She had not only dishonored herself, but stabbed the man she loved.

Josephine, on the other hand, was exhausted, but calm. The fearful escape she had had softened down by contrast her more distant terrors.

She began to shut her eyes again, and let herself drift. Above all, the doctor's promise comforted her: that she should go to Paris with him, and have her boy.

This deceitful calm of the heart lasted three days.

Carefully encouraged by Rose, it was destroyed by Jacintha.

Jacintha, conscious that she had betrayed her trust, was almost heart-broken. She was ashamed to appear before her young mistress, and, coward-like, wanted to avoid knowing even how much harm she had done.

She pretended toothache, bound up her face, and never stirred from the kitchen. But she was not to escape: the other servant came down with a message: "Madame Raynal wanted to see her directly."

She came quaking, and found Josephine all alone.

Josephine rose to meet her, and casting a furtive glance round the room first, threw her arms round Jacintha's neck, and embraced her with many tears.

"Was ever fidelity like yours? how could you do it, Jacintha? and how can I ever repay it? But, no; it is too base of me to accept such a sacrifice from any woman."

Jacintha was so confounded she did not know what to say. But it was a mystification that could not endure long between two women, who were both deceived by a third. Between them they soon discovered that it must have been Rose who had sacrificed herself.

"And Edouard has never been here since," said Josephine.

"And never will, madame."

"Yes, he shall! there must be some limit even to my feebleness, and my sister's devotion. You shall take a line to him from me. I will write it this moment."

The letter was written. But it was never sent. Rose found Josephine and Jacintha together; saw a letter was being written, asked to see it; on Josephine's hesitating, snatched it out of her hand, read it, tore it to pieces, and told Jacintha to leave the room. She hated the sight of poor Jacintha, who had slept at the very moment when all depended on her watchfulness.

"So you were going to send to him, unknown to me."

"Forgive me, Rose." Rose burst out crying.

"O Josephine! is it come to this? Would you deceive me?"

"You have deceived me! Yes! it has come to that. I know all. Twill not consent to destroy all I love."

She then begged hard for leave to send the letter.

Rose gave an impetuous refusal. "What could you say to him? foolish thing, don't you know him, and his vanity? When you had exposed yourself to him, and showed him I had insulted him for you, do you think he would forgive me? No! this is to make light of my love--to make me waste the sacrifice I have made. I feel that sacrifice as much as you do, more perhaps, and I would rather die in a convent than waste that night of shame and agony. Come, promise me, no more attempts of that kind, or we are sisters no more, friends no more, one heart and one blood no more."

The weaker nature, weakened still more by ill-health and grief, was terrified into submission, or rather temporized. "Kiss me then," said Josephine, "and love me to the end. Ah, if I was only in my grave!"

Rose kissed her with many sighs, but Josephine smiled. Rose eyed her with suspicion. That deep smile; what did it mean? She had formed some resolution. "She is going to deceive me somehow," thought Rose.

From that day she watched Josephine like a spy. Confidence was gone between them. Suspicion took its place.

Rose was right in her misgivings. The moment Josephine saw that Edouard's happiness and Rose's were to be sacrificed for her whom nothing could make happy, the poor thing said to herself, "I can die."

And that was the happy thought that made her smile.

The doctor gave her laudanum: he found she could not sleep: and he thought it all-important that she should sleep.

Josephine, instead of taking these small doses, saved them all up, secreted them in a phial, and so, from the sleep of a dozen nights, collected the sleep of death: and now she was tranquil. This young creature that could not bear to give pain to any one else, prepared her own death with a calm resolution the heroes of our sex have not often equalled. It was so little a thing to her to strike Josephine. Death would save her honor, would spare her the frightful alternative of deceiving her husband, or of telling him she was another's. "Poor Raynal," said she to herself, "it is so cruel to tie him to a woman who can never be to him what he deserves. Rose would then prove her innocence to Edouard. A few tears for a weak, loving soul, and they would all be happy and forget her."

One day the baroness, finding herself alone with Rose and Dr. Aubertin, asked the latter what he thought of Josephine's state.

"Oh, she was better: had slept last night without her usual narcotic."

The baroness laid down her knitting and said, with much meaning, "And I tell you, you will never cure her body till you can cure her mind. My poor child has some secret sorrow."

"Sorrow!" said Aubertin, stoutly concealing the uneasiness these words created, "what sorrow?"

"Oh, she has some deep sorrow. And so have you, Rose."

"Me, mamma! what do you mean?"

The baroness's pale cheek flushed a little. "I mean," said she, "that my patience is worn out at last; I cannot live surrounded by secrets. Raynal's gloomy looks when he left us, after staying but one hour; Josephine ill from that day, and bursting into tears at every word; yourself pale and changed, hiding an unaccountable sadness under forced smiles-- Now, don't interrupt me. Edouard, who was almost like a son, gone off, without a word, and never comes near us now."

"Really you are ingenious in tormenting yourself. Josephine is ill! Well, is it so very strange? Have you never been ill? Rose is pale! you are pale, my dear; but she has nursed her sister for a month; is it a wonder she has lost color? Edouard is gone a journey, to inherit his uncle's property: a million francs. But don't you go and fall ill, like Josephine; turn pale, like Rose; and make journeys in the region of fancy, after Edouard Riviere, who is tramping along on the vulgar high road."

This tirade came from Aubertin, and very clever he thought himself. But he had to do with a shrewd old lady, whose suspicions had long smouldered; and now burst out. She said quietly, "Oh, then Edouard is not in this part of the world. That alters the case: where is he?"

"In Normandy, probably," said Rose, blushing.

The baroness looked inquiringly towards Aubertin. He put on an innocent face and said nothing.

"Very good," said the baroness. "It's plain I am to learn nothing from you two. But I know somebody who will be more communicative. Yes: this uncomfortable smiling, and unreasonable crying, and interminable whispering; these appearances of the absent, and disappearances of the present; I shall know this very day what they all mean."

"Really, I do not understand you."

"Oh, never mind; I am an old woman, and I am in my dotage. For all that, perhaps you will allow me two words alone with my daughter."

"I retire, madame," and he disappeared with a bow to her, and an anxious look at Rose. She did not need this; she clenched her teeth, and braced herself up to stand a severe interrogatory.

Mother and daughter looked at one another, as if to measure forces, and then, instead of questioning her as she had intended, the baroness sank back in her chair and wept aloud. Rose was all unprepared for this. She almost screamed in a voice of agony, "O mamma! mamma! O God! kill me where I stand for making my mother weep!"

"My girl," said the baroness in a broken voice, and with the most touching dignity, "may you never know what a mother feels who finds herself shut out from her daughters' hearts. Sometimes I think it is my fault; I was born in a severer age. A mother nowadays seems to be a sort of elder sister. In my day she was something more. Yet I loved my mother as well, or better than I did my sisters. But it is not so with those I have borne in my bosom, and nursed upon my knee."

At this Rose flung herself, sobbing and screaming, at her mother's knees. The baroness was alarmed. "Come, dearest, don't cry like that. It is not too late to take your poor old mother into your confidence. What is this mystery? and why this sorrow? How comes it I intercept at every instant glances that were not intended for me? Why is the very air loaded with signals and secrecy? (Rose replied only by sobs.) Is some deceit going on? (Rose sobbed.) Am I to have no reply but these sullen sobs? will you really tell me nothing?"

"I've nothing to tell," sobbed Rose.

"Well, then, will you do something for me?"

Such a proposal was not only a relief, but a delight to the deceiving but loving daughter. She started up crying, "Oh, yes, mamma; anything, everything. Oh, thank you!" In the ardor of her gratitude, she wanted to kiss her mother; but the baroness declined the embrace politely, and said, coldly and bitterly, "I shall not ask much; I should not venture now to draw largely on your affection; it's only to write a few lines for me."

Rose got paper and ink with great alacrity, and sat down all beaming, pen in hand.

The baroness dictated the letter slowly, with an eye gimleting her daughter all the time.

"Dear--Monsieur--Riviere."

The pen fell from Rose's hand, and she turned red and then pale.

"What! write to him?"

"Not in your own name; in mine. But perhaps you prefer to give me the trouble."

"Cruel! cruel!" sighed Rose, and wrote the words as requested.

The baroness dictated again,--

"Oblige me by coming here at your very earliest convenience."

"But, mamma, if he is in Normandy," remonstrated Rose, fighting every inch of the ground.

"Never you mind where he is," said the baroness. "Write as I request."

"Yes, mamma," said Rose with sudden alacrity; for she had recovered her ready wit, and was prepared to write anything, being now fully resolved the letter should never go.

"Now sign my name." Rose complied. "There; now fold it, and address it to his lodgings." Rose did so; and, rising with a cheerful air, said she would send Jacintha with it directly.

She was half across the room when her mother called her quietly back.

"No, mademoiselle," said she sternly. "You will give me the letter. I can trust neither the friend of twenty years, nor the servant that stayed by me in adversity, nor the daughter I suffered for and nursed. And why don't I trust you? Because you have told me a lie."

At this word, which in its coarsest form she had never heard from those high-born lips till then, Rose cowered like a hare.

"Ay, a lie," said the baroness. "I saw Edouard Riviere in the park but yesterday. I saw him. My old eyes are feeble, but they are not deceitful. I saw him. Send my breakfast to my own room. I come of an ancient race: I could not sit with liars; I should forget courtesy; you would see in my face how thoroughly I scorn you all." And she went haughtily out with the letter in her hand.

Rose for the first time, was prostrated. Vain had been all this deceit; her mother was not happy; was not blinded. Edouard might come and tell her his story. Then no power could keep Josephine silent. The plot was thickening; the fatal net was drawing closer and closer.

She sank with a groan into a chair, and body and spirit alike succumbed. But that was only for a little while. To this prostration succeeded a feverish excitement. She could not, would not, look Edouard in the face. She would implore Josephine to be silent; and she herself would fly from the chateau. But, if Josephine would not be silent? Why, then she would go herself to Edouard, and throw herself upon his honor, and tell him the truth. With this, she ran wildly up the stairs, and burst into Josephine's room so suddenly, that she caught her, pale as death, on her knees, with a letter in one hand and a phial of laudanum in the other.

Josephine conveyed the phial into her bosom with wonderful rapidity and dexterity, and rose to her feet. But Rose just saw her conceal something, and resolved to find out quietly what it was. So she said nothing about it, but asked Josephine what on earth she was doing.

"I was praying."

"And what is that letter?"

"A letter I have just received from Colonel Raynal."

Rose took the letter and read it. Raynal had written from Paris. He was coming to Beaurepaire to stay a month, and was to arrive that very day.

Then Rose forgot all about herself, and even what she had come for. She clung about her sister's neck, and implored her, for her sake, to try and love Raynal.

Josephine shuddered, and clung weeping to her sister in turn. For in Rose's arms she realized more powerfully what that sister would suffer if she were to die. Now, while they clung together, Rose felt something hard, and contrived just to feel it with her cheek. It was the phial.

A chill suspicion crossed the poor girl. The attitude in which she had found Josephine; the letter, the look of despair, and now this little bottle, which she had hidden. Why hide it? She resolved not to let Josephine out of her sight; at all events, until she had seen this little bottle, and got it away from her.

She helped her to dress, and breakfasted with her in the tapestried room, and dissembled, and put on gayety, and made light of everything but Josephine's health.

Her efforts were not quite in vain. Josephine became more composed; and Rose even drew from her a half promise that she would give Raynal and time a fair trial.

And now Rose was relieved of her immediate apprehensions for Josephine, but the danger of another kind, from Edouard, remained. So she ran into her bedroom for her bonnet and shawl, determined to take the strong measure of visiting Edouard at once, or intercepting him. While she was making her little toilet, she heard her mother's voice in the room. This was unlucky; she must pass through that room to go out. She sat down and fretted at this delay. And then, as the baroness appeared to be very animated, Rose went to the keyhole, and listened. Their mother was telling Josephine how she had questioned Rose, and how Rose had told her an untruth, and how she had made that young lady write to Edouard, etc.; in short, the very thing Rose wanted to conceal from Josephine.

Rose lost all patience, and determined to fly through the room and out before anybody could stop her. She heard Jacintha come in with some message, and thought that would be a good opportunity to slip out unmolested. So she opened the door softly. Jacintha, it seemed, had been volunteering some remark that was not well received, for the baroness was saying, sharply, "Your opinion is not asked. Go down directly, and bring him up here, to this room." Jacintha cast a look of dismay at Rose, and vanished.

Rose gathered from that look, as much as from the words, who the visitor was. She made a dart after Jacintha. But the room was a long one, and the baroness intercepted her: "No," said she, gravely, "I cannot spare you."

Rose stood pale and panting, but almost defiant. "Mamma," said she, "if it is Monsieur Riviere, I must ask your leave to retire. And you have neither love nor pity, nor respect for me, if you detain me."

"Mademoiselle!" was the stern reply, "I forbid you to move. Be good enough to sit there;" with which the baroness pointed imperiously to a sofa at the other side of the room. "Josephine, go to your room." Josephine retired, casting more than one anxious glance over her shoulder.

Rose looked this way and that in despair and terror; but ended by sinking, more dead than alive, into the seat indicated; and even as she drooped, pale and trembling, on that sofa, Edouard Riviere, worn and agitated, entered the room, and bowed low to them all, without a word.

The baroness looked at him, and then at her daughter, as much as to say, now I have got you; deceive me now if you can. "Rose, my dear," said this terrible old woman, affecting honeyed accents, "don't you see Monsieur Riviere?"

The poor girl at this challenge rose with difficulty, and courtesied humbly to Edouard.

He bowed to her, and stealing a rapid glance saw her pallor and distress; and that showed him she was not so hardened as he had thought.

"You have not come to see us lately," said the baroness, quietly, "yet you have been in the neighborhood."

These words puzzled Edouard. Was the old lady all in the dark, then? As a public man he had already learned to be on his guard; so he stammered out, "That he had been much occupied with public duties."

Madame de Beaurepaire despised this threadbare excuse too much to notice it at all. She went on as if he had said nothing. "Intimate as you were with us, you must have some reason for deserting us so suddenly."

"I have," said Edouard, gravely.

"What is it?"

"Excuse me," said Edouard, sullenly.

"No, monsieur, I cannot. This neglect, succeeding to a somewhat ardent pursuit of my daughter, is almost an affront. You shall, of course, withdraw yourself altogether, if you choose. But not without an explanation. This much is due to me; and, if you are a gentleman, you will not withhold it from me."

"If he is a gentleman!" cried Rose; "O mamma, do not you affront a gentleman, who never, never gave you nor me any ground of offence. Why affront the friends and benefactors we have lost by our own fault?"

"Oh, then, it is all your fault," said the baroness. "I feared as much."

"All my fault, all," said Rose; then putting her pretty palms together, and casting a look of abject supplication on Edouard, she murmured, "my temper!"

"Do not you put words into his mouth," said the shrewd old lady. "Come, Monsieur Riviere, be a man, and tell me the truth. What has she said to you? What has she done?"

By this time the abject state of terror the high-spirited Rose was in, and her piteous glances, had so disarmed Edouard, that he had not the heart to expose her to her mother.

"Madame," said he, stiffly, taking Rose's hint, "my temper and mademoiselle's could not accord."

"Why, her temper is charming: it is joyous, equal, and gentle."

"You misunderstand me, madame; I do not reproach Mademoiselle Rose. It is I who am to blame."

"For what?" inquired the baroness dryly.

"For not being able to make her love me."

"Oh! that is it! She did not love you?"

"Ask herself, madame," said Edouard, bitterly.

"Rose," said the baroness, her eye now beginning to twinkle, "were you really guilty of such a want of discrimination? Didn't you love monsieur?"

Rose flung her arms round her mother's neck, and said, "No, mamma, I did not love Monsieur Edouard," in an exquisite tone of love, that to a female ear conveyed the exact opposite of the words.

But Edouard had not that nice discriminating ear. He sighed deeply, and the baroness smiled. "You tell me that?" said she, "and you are crying!"

"She is crying, madame?" said Edouard, inquiringly, and taking a step towards them.

"Why, you see she is, you foolish boy. Come, I must put an end to this;" and she rose coolly from her seat, and begging Edouard to forgive her for leaving him a moment with his deadly enemy, went off with knowing little nods into Josephine's room; only, before she entered it, she turned, and with a maternal smile discharged this word at the pair.

"Babies!"

But between the alienated lovers was a long distressing silence. Neither knew what to say; and their situation was intolerable. At last Rose ventured in a timorous voice to say, "I thank you for your generosity. But I knew that you would not betray me."

"Your secret is safe for me," sighed Edouard. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

Rose shook her head sadly.

Edouard moved to the door.

Rose bowed her head with a despairing moan. It took him by the heart and held him. He hesitated, then came towards her.

"I see you are sorry for what you have done to me who loved you so; and you loved me. Oh! yes, do not deny it, Rose; there was a time you loved me. And that makes it worse: to have given me such sweet hopes, only to crush both them and me. And is not this cruel of you to weep so and let me see your penitence--when it is too late?"

"Alas! how can I help my regrets? I have insulted so good a friend."

There was a sad silence. Then as he looked at her, her looks belied the charge her own lips had made against herself.

A light seemed to burst on Edouard from that high-minded, sorrow-stricken face.

"Tell me it is false!" he cried.

She hid her face in her hands--woman's instinct to avoid being read.

"Tell me you were misled then, fascinated, perverted, but that your heart returned to me. Clear yourself of deliberate deceit, and I will believe and thank you on my knees."

"Heaven have pity on us both!" cried poor Rose.

"On us! Thank you for saying on us. See now, you have not gained happiness by destroying mine. One word--do you love that man?--that Dujardin?"

"You know I do not."

"I am glad of that; since his life is forfeited; if he escapes my friend Raynal, he shall not escape me."

Rose uttered a cry of terror. "Hush! not so loud. The life of Camille! Oh! if he were to die, what would become of--oh, pray do not speak so loud."

"Own then that you do love him," yelled Edouard; "give me truth, if you have no love to give. Own that you love him, and he shall be safe. It is myself I will kill, for being such a slave as to love you still."

Rose's fortitude gave way.

"I cannot bear it," she cried despairingly; "it is beyond my strength; Edouard, swear to me you will keep what I tell you secret as the grave!"

"Ah!" cried Edouard, all radiant with hope, "I swear."

"Then you are under a delirium. I have deceived, but never wronged you; that unhappy child is not-- Hush! Here she comes."

The baroness came smiling out, and Josephine's wan, anxious face was seen behind her.

"Well," said the baroness, "is the war at an end? What, are we still silent? Let me try then what I can do. Edouard, lend me your hand."

While Edouard hesitated, Josephine clasped her hands and mutely supplicated him to consent. Her sad face, and the thought of how often she had stood his friend, shook his resolution. He held out his hand, but slowly and reluctantly.

"There is my hand," he groaned.

"And here is mine, mamma," said Rose, smiling to please her mother.

Oh! the mixture of feeling, when her soft warm palm pressed his. How the delicious sense baffled and mystified the cold judgment.

Josephine raised her eyes thankfully to heaven.

While the young lovers yet thrilled at each other's touch, yet could not look one another in the face, a clatter of horses' feet was heard.

"That is Colonel Raynal," said Josephine, with unnatural calmness. "I expected him to-day."

The baroness was at the side window in a moment.

"It is he!--it is he!"

She hurried down to embrace her son.

Josephine went without a word to her own room. Rose followed her the next minute. But in that one minute she worked magic.

She glided up to Edouard, and looked him full in the face: not the sad, depressed, guilty-looking humble Rose of a moment before, but the old high-spirited, and some what imperious girl.

"You have shown yourself noble this day. I am going to trust you as only the noble are trusted. Stay in the house till I can speak to you."

She was gone, and something leaped within Edouard's bosom, and a flood of light seemed to burst in on him. Yet he saw no object clearly: but he saw light.

Rose ran into Josephine's room, and once more surprised her on her knees, and in the very act of hiding something in her bosom.

"What are you doing, Josephine, on your knees?" said she, sternly.

"I have a great trial to go through," was the hesitating answer.

Rose said nothing. She turned paler. She is deceiving me, thought she, and she sat down full of bitterness and terror, and, affecting not to watch Josephine, watched her.

"Go and tell them I am coming, Rose."

"No, Josephine, I will not leave you till this terrible meeting is over. We will encounter him hand in hand, as we used to go when our hearts were one, and we deceived others, but never each other."

At this tender reproach Josephine fell upon her neck and wept.

"I will not deceive you," she said. "I am worse than the poor doctor thinks me. My life is but a little candle that a breath may put out any day."

Rose said nothing, but trembled and watched her keenly.

"My little Henri," said Josephine imploringly, "what would you do with him--if anything should happen to me?"

"What would I do with him? He is mine. I should be his mother. Oh! what words are these: my heart! my heart!"

"No, dearest; some day you will be married, and owe all the mother to your children; and Henri is not ours only: he belongs to some one I have seemed unkind to. Perhaps he thinks me heartless. For I am a foolish woman; I don't know how to be virtuous, yet show a man my heart. But then he will understand me and forgive me. Rose, love, you will write to him. He will come to you. You will go together to the place where I shall be sleeping. You will show him my heart. You will tell him all my long love that lasted to the end. You need not blush to tell him all. I have no right. Then you will give him his poor Josephine's boy, and you will say to him, 'She never loved but you: she gives you all that is left of her, her child. She only prays you not to give him a bad mother.'"

Poor soul! this was her one bit of little, gentle jealousy; but it made her eyes stream. She would have put out her hand from the tomb to keep her boy's father single all his life.

"Oh! my Josephine, my darling sister," cried Rose, "why do you speak of death? Do you meditate a crime?"

"No; but it was on my heart to say it: it has done me good."

"At least, take me to your bosom, my well-beloved, that I may not see your tears."

"There--tears? No, you have lightened my heart. Bless you! bless you!"

The sisters twined their bosoms together in a long, gentle embrace. You might have taken them for two angels that flowed together in one love, but for their tears.

A deep voice was now heard in the sitting-room.

Josephine and Rose postponed the inevitable one moment more, by arranging their hair in the glass: then they opened the door, and entered the tapestried room.

Raynal was sitting on the sofa, the baroness's hand in his. Edouard was not there.

Colonel Raynal had given him a strange look, and said, "What, you here?" in a tone of voice that was intolerable.

Raynal came to meet the sisters. He saluted Josephine on the brow.

"You are pale, wife: and how cold her hand is."

"She has been ill this month past," said Rose interposing.

"You look ill, too, Mademoiselle Rose."

"Never mind," cried the baroness joyously, "you will revive them both."

Raynal made no reply to that.

"How long do you stay this time, a day?"

"A month, mother."

The doctor now joined the party, and friendly greetings passed between him and Raynal.

But ere long somehow all became conscious this was not a joyful meeting. The baroness could not alone sustain the spirits of the party, and soon even she began to notice that Raynal's replies were short, and that his manner was distrait and gloomy. The sisters saw this too, and trembled for what might be coming.

At last Raynal said bluntly, "Josephine, I want to speak to you alone."

The baroness gave the doctor a look, and made an excuse for going down-stairs to her own room. As she was going Josephine went to her and said calmly,--

"Mother, you have not kissed me to-day."

"There! Bless you, my darling!"

Raynal looked at Rose. She saw she must go, but she lingered, and sought her sister's eye: it avoided her. At that Rose ran to the doctor, who was just going out of the door.

"Oh! doctor," she whispered trembling, "don't go beyond the door. I found her praying. My mind misgives me. She is going to tell him-- or something worse."

"What do you mean?"

"I am afraid to say all I dread. She could not be so calm if she meant to live. Be near! as I shall. She has a phial hid in her bosom."

She left the old man trembling, and went back.

"Excuse me," said she to Raynal, "I only came to ask Josephine if she wants anything."

"No!--yes!--a glass of eau sucree."

Rose mixed it for her. While doing this she noticed that Josephine shunned her eye, but Raynal gazed gently and with an air of pity on her.

She retired slowly into Josephine's bedroom, but did not quite close the door.

Raynal had something to say so painful that he shrank from plunging into it. He therefore, like many others, tried to creep into it, beginning with something else.

"Your health," said he, "alarms me. You seem sad, too. I don't understand that. You have no news from the Rhine, have you?"

"Monsieur!" said Josephine scared.

"Do not call me monsieur, nor look so frightened. Call me your friend. I am your sincere friend."

"Oh, yes; you always were."

"Thank you. You will give me a dearer title before we part this time."

"Yes," said Josephine in a low whisper, and shuddered.

"Have you forgiven me frightening you so that night?"

"Yes."

"It was a shock to me, too, I can tell you. I like the boy. She professed to love him, and, to own the truth, I loathe all treachery and deceit. If I had done a murder, I would own it. A lie doubles every crime. But I took heart; we are all selfish, we men; of the two sisters one was all innocence and good faith; and she was the one I had chosen."

At these words Josephine rose, like a statue moving, and took a phial from her bosom and poured the contents into the glass.

But ere she could drink it, if such was her intention, Raynal, with his eyes gloomily lowered, said, in a voice full of strange solemnity,--

"I went to the army of the Rhine."

Josephine put down the glass directly, though without removing her hand from it.

"I see you understand me, and approve. Yes, I saw that your sister would be dishonored, and I went to the army and saw her seducer."

"You saw him. Oh, I hope you did not go and speak to him of--of this?"

"Why, of course I did."

Josephine resolved to know the worst at once. "May I ask," said she, "what you told him?"

"Why, I told him all I had discovered, and pointed out the course he must take; he must marry your sister at once. He refused. I challenged him. But ere we met, I was ordered to lead a forlorn hope against a bastion. Then, seeing me go to certain death, the noble fellow pitied me. I mean this is how I understood it all at the time; at any rate, he promised to marry Rose if he should live."

Josephine put out her hand, and with a horrible smile said, "I thank you; you have saved the honor of our family;" and with no more ado, she took the glass in her hand to drink the fatal contents.

But Raynal's reply arrested her hand. He said solemnly, "No, I have not. Have you no inkling of the terrible truth? Do not fiddle with that glass: drink it, or leave it alone; for, indeed, I need all your attention."

He took the glass out of her patient hand, and with a furtive look at the bedroom-door, drew her away to the other end of the room; "and," said he, "I could not tell your mother, for she knows nothing of the girl's folly; still less Rose, for I see she loves him still, or why is she so pale? Advise me, now, whilst we are alone. Colonel Dujardin was comparatively indifferent to you. Will you undertake the task? A rough soldier like me is not the person to break the terrible tidings to that poor girl."

"What tidings? You confuse, you perplex me. Oh! what does this horrible preparation mean?"

"It means he will never marry your sister; he will never see her more."

Then Raynal walked the room in great agitation, which at once communicated itself to his hearer. But the loving heart is ingenious in avoiding its dire misgivings.

"I see," said she; "he told you he would never visit Beaurepaire again. He was right."

Raynal shook his head sorrowfully.

"Ah, Josephine, you are far from the truth. I was to attack the bastion. It was mined by the enemy, and he knew it. He took advantage of my back being turned. He led his men out of the trenches; he assaulted the bastion at the head of his brigade. He took it."

"Ah, it was noble; it was like him."

"The enemy, retiring, blew the bastion into the air, and Dujardin-- is dead."

"Dead!" said Josephine, in stupefied tones, as if the word conveyed no meaning to her mind, benumbed and stunned by the blow.

"Don't speak so loud," said Raynal; "I hear the poor girl at the door. Ay, he took my place, and is dead."

"Dead!"

"Swallowed up in smoke and flames, overwhelmed and crushed under the ruins."

Josephine's whole body gave way, and heaved like a tree falling under the axe. She sank slowly to her knees, and low moans of agony broke from her at intervals. "Dead, dead, dead!"

"Is it not terrible?" he cried.

She did not see him nor hear him, but moaned out wildly, "Dead, dead, dead!" The bedroom-door was opened.

She shrieked with sudden violence, "Dead! ah, pity! the glass! the composing draught." She stretched her hands out wildly. Raynal, with a face full of concern, ran to the table, and got the glass. She crawled on her knees to meet it; he brought it quickly to her hand.

"There, my poor soul!"

Even as their hands met, Rose threw herself on the cup, and snatched it with fury from them both. She was white as ashes, and her eyes, supernaturally large, glared on Raynal with terror. "Madman!" she cried, "would you kill her?"

He glared back on her: what did this mean? Their eyes were fixed on each other like combatants for life and death; they did not see that the room was filling with people, that the doctor was only on the other side of the table, and that the baroness and Edouard were at the door, and all looking wonderstruck at this strange sight-- Josephine on her knees, and those two facing each other, white, with dilating eyes, the glass between them.

But what was that to the horror, when the next moment the patient Josephine started to her feet, and, standing in the midst, tore her hair by handfuls, out of her head.

"Ah, you snatch the kind poison from me!"

"Poison!"

"Poison!"

"Poison!" cried the others, horror-stricken.

"Ah! you won't let me die. Curse you all! curse you! I never had my own way in anything. I was always a slave and a fool. I have murdered the man I love--I love. Yes, my husband, do you hear? the man I love."

"Hush! daughter, respect my gray hairs."

"Your gray hairs! You are not so old in years as I am in agony. So this is your love, Rose! Ah, you won't let me die--won't you? Then I'll do worse--I'll tell."

"He who is dead; you have murdered him amongst you, and I'll follow him in spite of you all--he was my betrothed. He struggled wounded, bleeding, to my feet. He found me married. News came of my husband's death; I married my betrothed."

"Married him!" exclaimed the baroness.

"Ah, my poor mother. And she kissed me so kindly just now--she will kiss me no more. Oh, I am not ashamed of marrying him. I am only ashamed of the cowardice that dared not do it in face of all the world. We had scarce been happy a fortnight, when a letter came from Colonel Raynal. He was alive. I drove my true husband away, wretch that I was. None but bad women have an atom of sense. I tried to do my duty to my legal husband. He was my benefactor. I thought it was my duty. Was it? I don't know: I have lost the sense of right and wrong. I turned from a living creature to a lie. He who had scattered benefits on me and all this house; he whom it was too little to love; he ought to have been adored: this man came here one night to wife proud, joyous, and warm-hearted. He found a cradle, and two women watching it. Now Edouard, now monsieur, do you see that life is impossible to me? One bravely accused herself: she was innocent. One swooned away like a guilty coward."

Edouard uttered an exclamation.

"Yes, Edouard, you shall not be miserable like me; she was guilty. You do not understand me yet, my poor mother--and she was so happy this morning--I was the liar, the coward, the double-faced wife, the miserable mother that denied her child. Now will you let me die? Now do you see that I can't and won't live upon shame and despair? Ah, Monsieur Raynal, my dear friend, you were always generous: you will pity and kill me. I have dishonored the name you gave me to keep: I am neither Beaurepaire nor Raynal. Do pray kill me, monsieur--Jean, do pray release me from my life!"

And she crawled to his knees and embraced them, and kissed his hand, and pleaded more piteously for death, than others have begged for life.

Raynal stood like a rock: he was pale, and drew his breath audibly, but not a word. Then came a sight scarce less terrible than Josephine's despair. The baroness, looking and moving twenty years older than an hour before, tottered across the room to Raynal.

"Sir, you whom I have called my son, but whom I will never presume so to call again, I thought I had lived long enough never to have to blush again. I loved you, monsieur. I prayed every day for you. But she who was my daughter was not of my mind. Monsieur, I have never knelt but to God and to my king, and I kneel to you: forgive us, sir, forgive us!"

She tried to go down on her knees. He raised her with his strong arm, but he could not speak. She turned on the others.

"So this is the secret you were hiding from me! This secret has not killed you all. Oh! I shall not live under its shame so long as you have. Chateau of Beaurepaire--nest of treason, ingratitude, and immodesty--I loathe you as much as once I loved you. I will go and hide my head, and die elsewhere."

"Stay, madame!" said he, in a voice whose depth and dignity was such that it seemed impossible to disobey it. "It was sudden--I was shaken--but I am myself again."

"Oh, show some pity!" cried Rose.

"I shall try to be just."

There was a long, trembling silence; and during that silence and terrible agitation, one figure stood firm among those quaking, beating hearts, like a rock with the waves breaking round it--the man of principle among the creatures of impulse.

He raised Josephine from her knees, and placed her all limp and powerless in an arm-chair. To her frenzy had now succeeded a sickness and feebleness like unto death.

"Widow Dujardin," said he, in a broken voice, "listen to me."

She moaned a sort of assent.

"Your mistake has been not trusting me. I was your friend, and not a selfish friend. I was not enough in love with you to destroy your happiness. Besides, I despise that sort of love. If you had told me all, I would have spared you this misery. By the present law, civil contracts of marriage can be dissolved by mutual consent."

At this the baroness uttered some sign of surprise.

"Ah!" continued Raynal, sadly, "you are aristocrats, and cannot keep pace with the times. This very day our mere contract shall be formally dissolved. Indeed, it ceases to exist since both parties are resolved to withdraw from it. So, if you married Dujardin in a church, you are Madame Dujardin at this moment, and his child is legitimate. What does she say?"

This question was to Rose, for what Josephine uttered sounded like a mere articulate moan. But Rose's quick ear had caught words, and she replied, all in tears, "My poor sister is blessing you, sir. We all bless you."

"She does not understand my position," said Raynal. He then walked up to Josephine, and leaning over her arm, and speaking rather loud, under the impression that her senses were blunted by grief, he said, "Look here: Colonel Dujardin, your husband, deliberately, and with his eyes open, sacrificed his life for me, and for his own heroic sense of honor. Now, it is my turn. If that hero stood here, and asked me for all the blood in my body, I would give it him. He is gone; but, dying for me, he has left me his widow and his child; they remain under my wing. To protect them is my pride, and my only consolation. I am going to the mayor to annul our unlucky contract in due form, and make us brother and sister instead. But," turning to the baroness, "don't you think to escape me as your daughter has done: no, no, old lady, once a mother, always a mother. Stir from your son's home if you dare!"

And with these words, in speaking which his voice had recovered its iron firmness, he strode out at the door, superb in manhood and principle, and every eye turned with wonder and admiration after him. Even when he was gone they gazed at the door by which a creature so strangely noble had disappeared.

The baroness was about to follow him without taking any notice of Josephine. But Rose caught her by the gown. "O mother, speak to poor Josephine: bid her live."

The baroness only made a gesture of horror and disgust, and turned her back on them both.

Josephine, who had tottered up from her seat at Rose's words, sank heavily down again, and murmured, "Ah! the grave holds all that love me now."

Rose ran to her side. "Cruel Josephine! what, do not I love you? Mother, will you not help me persuade her to live? Oh! if she dies, I will die too; you will kill both your children."

Stern and indignant as the baroness was, yet these words pierced her heart. She turned with a piteous, half apologetic air to Edouard and Aubertin. "Gentlemen," said she, "she has been foolish, not guilty. Heaven pardons the best of us. Surely a mother may forgive her child." And with this nature conquered utterly; and she held out her arms, wide, wide, as is a mother's heart. Her two erring children rushed sobbing violently into them; and there was not a dry eye in the room for a long time.

After this, Josephine's heart almost ceased to beat. Fear and misgivings, and the heavy sense of deceit gnawing an honorable heart, were gone. Grief reigned alone in the pale, listless, bereaved widow.

The marriage was annulled before the mayor; and, three days afterwards, Raynal, by his influence, got the consummated marriage formally allowed in Paris.

With a delicacy for which one would hardly have given him credit, he never came near Beaurepaire till all this was settled; but he brought the document from Paris that made Josephine the widow Dujardin, and her boy the heir of Beaurepaire; and the moment she was really Madame Dujardin he avoided her no longer; and he became a comfort to her instead of a terror.

The dissolution of the marriage was a great tie between them. So much that, seeing how much she looked up to Raynal, the doctor said one day to the baroness, "If I know anything of human nature, they will marry again, provided none of you give her a hint which way her heart is turning."

They, who have habituated themselves to live for others, can suffer as well as do great things. Josephine kept alive. A passion such as hers, in a selfish nature, must have killed her.

Even as it was, she often said, "It is hard to live."

Then they used to talk to her of her boy. Would she leave him-- Camille's boy--without a mother? And these words were never spoken to her quite in vain.

Her mother forgave her entirely, and loved her as before. Who could be angry with her long? The air was no longer heavy with lies. Wretched as she was, she breathed lighter. Joy and hope were gone. Sorrowful peace was coming. When the heart comes to this, nothing but Time can cure; but what will not Time do? What wounds have I seen him heal! His cures are incredible.

The little party sat one day, peaceful, but silent and sad, in the Pleasaunce, under the great oak.

Two soldiers came to the gate. They walked feebly, for one was lame, and leaned upon the other, who was pale and weak, and leaned upon a stick.

"Soldiers," said Raynal, "and invalided."

"Give them food and wine," said Josephine.

Rose went towards them; but she had scarcely taken three steps ere she cried out,--

"It is Dard! it is poor Dard! Come in, Dard, come in."

Dard limped towards them, leaning upon Sergeant La Croix. A bit of Dard's heel had been shot away, and of La Croix's head.

Rose ran to the kitchen.

"Jacintha, bring out a table into the Pleasaunce, and something for two guests to eat."

The soldiers came slowly to the Pleasaunce, and were welcomed, and invited to sit down, and received with respect; for France even in that day honored the humblest of her brave.

Soon Jacintha came out with a little round table in her hands, and affected a composure which was belied by her shaking hands and her glowing cheek.

After a few words of homely welcome--not eloquent, but very sincere-- she went off again with her apron to her eyes. She reappeared with the good cheer, and served the poor fellows with radiant zeal.

"What regiment?" asked Raynal.

Dard was about to answer, but his superior stopped him severely; then, rising with his hand to his forehead, he replied, with pride, "Twenty-fourth brigade, second company. We were cut up at Philipsburg, and incorporated with the 12th."

Raynal instantly regretted his question; for Josephine's eye fixed on Sergeant La Croix with an expression words cannot paint. Yet she showed more composure, real or forced, than he expected.

"Heaven sends him," said she. "My friend, tell me, were you--ah!"

Colonel Raynal interfered hastily. "Think what you do. He can tell you nothing but what we know, not so much, in fact, as we know; for, now I look at him, I think this is the very sergeant we found lying insensible under the bastion. He must have been struck before the bastion was taken even."

"I was, colonel, I was. I remember nothing but losing my senses, and feeling the colors go out of my hand."

"There, you see, he knows nothing," said Raynal.

"It was hot work, colonel, under that bastion, but it was hotter to the poor fellows that got in. I heard all about it from Private Dard here."

"So, then, it was you who carried the colors?"

"Yes, I was struck down with the colors of the brigade in my hand," cried La Croix.

"See how people blunder about, everything; they told me the colonel carried the colors."

"Why, of course he did. You don't think our colonel, the fighting colonel, would let me hold the colors of the brigade so long as he was alive. No; he was struck by a Prussian bullet, and he had just time to hand the colors to me, and point with his sword to the bastion, and down he went. It was hot work, I can tell you. I did not hold them long, not thirty seconds, and if we could know their history, they passed through more hands than that before they got to the Prussian flag-staff."

Raynal suddenly rose, and walked rapidly to and fro, with his hands behind him.

"Poor colonel!" continued La Croix. "Well, I love to think he died like a soldier, and not like some of my poor comrades, hashed to atoms, and not a volley fired over him. I hope they put a stone over him, for he was the best soldier and the best general in the army."

"O sir!" cried Josephine, "there is no stone even to mark the spot where he fell," and she sobbed despairingly.

"Why, how is this, Private Dard?" inquired La Croix, sternly.

Dard apologized for his comrade, and touching his own head significantly told them that since his wound the sergeant's memory was defective.

"Now, sergeant, didn't I tell you the colonel must have got the better of his wound, and got into the battery?"

"It's false, Private Dard; don't I know our colonel better than that? Would ever he have let those colors out of his hand, if there had been an ounce of life left in him?"

"He died at the foot of the battery, I tell you."

"Then why didn't we find him?"

Here Jacintha put in a word with the quiet subdued meaning of her class. "I can't find that anybody ever saw the colonel dead."

"They did not find him, because they did not look for him," said Sergeant La Croix.

"God forgive you, sergeant!" said Dard, with some feeling. "Not look for our Colonel! We turned over every body that lay there,-- full thirty there were,--and you were one of them."

"Only thirty! Why, we settled more Prussians than that, I'll swear."

"Oh! they carried off their dead."

"Ay! but I don't see why they should carry our colonel off. His epaulets was all the thieves could do any good with. Stop! yet I do, Private Dard; I have a horrible suspicion. No, I have not; it is a certainty. What! don't you see, ye ninny? Thunder and thousands of devils, here's a disgrace. Dogs of Prussians! they have got our colonel, they have taken him prisoner."

"O God bless them!" cried Josephine; "O God bless the mouth that tells me so! O sir, I am his wife, his poor heart-broken wife. You would not be so cruel as to mock my despair. Say again that he may be alive, pray, say it again!"

"His wife! Private Dard, why didn't you tell me? You tell me nothing. Yes, my pretty lady, I'll say it again, and I'll prove it. Here is an enemy in full retreat, would they encumber themselves with the colonel? If he was dead, they'd have whipped off his epaulets, and left him there. Alive? why not? Look at me: I am alive, and I was worse wounded than he was. They took me for dead, you see. Courage, madame! you will see him again, take an old soldier's word for it. Dard, attention! this is the colonel's wife."

She gazed on the speaker like one in a trance.

Every eye and every soul had been so bent on Sergeant La Croix that it was only now Raynal was observed to be missing. The next minute he came riding out of the stable-yard, and went full gallop down the road.

"Ah!" cried Rose, with a burst of hope; "he thinks so too; he has hopes. He is gone somewhere for information. Perhaps to Paris."

Josephine's excitement and alternations of hope and fear were now alarming. Rose held her hand, and implored her to try and be calm till they could see Raynal.

Just before dark he came riding fiercely home. Josephine flew down the stairs. Raynal at sight of her forgot all his caution. He waved his cocked hat in the air. She fell on her knees and thanked God. He gasped out,--

"Prisoner--exchanged for two Prussian lieutenants--sent home--they say he is in France!"

The tears of joy gushed in streams from her.

Some days passed in hope and joy inexpressible; but the good doctor was uneasy for Josephine. She was always listening with supernatural keenness and starting from her chair, and every fibre of her lovely person seemed to be on the quiver.

Nor was Rose without a serious misgiving. Would husband and wife ever meet? He evidently looked on her as Madame Raynal, and made it a point of honor to keep away from Beaurepaire.

They had recourse to that ever-soothing influence--her child. Madame Jouvenel was settled in the village, and Josephine visited her every day, and came back often with red eyes, but always soothed.

One day Rose and she went to Madame Jouvenel, and, entering the house without ceremony, found the nurse out, and no one watching the child.

"How careless!" said Rose.

Josephine stopped eagerly to kiss him. But instead of kissing him, she uttered a loud cry. There was a locket hanging round his neck.

It was a locket containing some of Josephine's hair and Camille's. She had given it him in the happy days that followed their marriage. She stood gasping in the middle of the room. Madame Jouvenel came running in soon after. Josephine, by a wonderful effort over herself, asked her calmly and cunningly,--

"Where is the gentleman who put this locket round my child's neck? I want to speak with him."

Madame Jouvenel stammered and looked confused.

"A soldier--an officer?--come, tell me!"

"Woman," cried Rose, "why do you hesitate?"

"What am I to do?" said Madame Jouvenel. "He made me swear never to mention his coming here. He goes away, or hides whenever you come. And since Madame does not love the poor wounded gentleman, what can he do better?"

"Not love him!" cried Rose: "why, she is his wife, his lawful wedded wife; he is a fool or a monster to run away for her. She loves him as no woman ever loved before. She pines for him. She dies for him."

The door of a little back room opened at these words of Rose, and there stood Camille, with his arm in a sling, pale and astounded, but great joy and wonder working in his face.

Josephine gave a cry of love that made the other two women weep, and in a moment they were sobbing for joy upon each other's neck.

Away went sorrow, doubt, despair, and all they had suffered. That one moment paid for all. And in that moment of joy and surprise, so great as to be almost terrible, perhaps it was well for Josephine that Camille, weakened by his wound, was quite overcome, and nearly fainted. She was herself just going into hysterics; but, seeing him quite overcome, she conquered them directly, and nursed, and soothed, and pitied, and encouraged him instead.

Then they sat hand in hand. Their happiness stopped their very breath. They could not speak. So Rose told him all. He never owned why he had slipped away when he saw them coming. He forgot it. He forgot all his hard thoughts of her. They took him home in the carriage. His wife would not let him out of her sight. For years and years after this she could hardly bear to let him be an hour out of her sight.

The world is wide; there may be a man in it who can paint the sudden bliss that fell on these two much suffering hearts; but I am not that man; this is beyond me; it was not only heaven, but heaven after hell.

Leave we the indescribable and the unspeakable for a moment, and go to a lighter theme.

The day Rose's character was so unexpectedly cleared, Edouard had no opportunity of speaking to her, or a reconciliation would have taken place. As it was, he went home intensely happy. But he did not resume his visits to the chateau. When he came to think calmly over it, his vanity was cruelly mortified. She was innocent of the greater offence; but how insolently she had sacrificed him, his love, and his respect, to another's interest.

More generous thoughts prevailed by degrees. And one day that her pale face, her tears, and her remorse got the better of his offended pride, he determined to give her a good lecture that should drown her in penitent tears; and then end by forgiving her. For one thing he could not be happy till he had forgiven her.

She walked into the room with a calm, dignified, stately air, and before he could utter one word of his grave remonstrance, attacked him thus: "You wish to speak to me, sir. If it is to apologize to me, I will save your vanity the mortification. I forgive you."

"You forgive me!" cried Edouard furiously.

"No violence, if you please," said the lady with cold hauteur. "Let us be friends, as Josephine and Raynal are. We cannot be anything more to one another now. You have wounded me too deeply by your jealous, suspicious nature."

Edouard gasped for breath, and was so far out-generalled that he accepted the place of defendant. "Wasn't I to believe your own lips? Did not Colonel Raynal believe you?"

"Oh, that's excusable. He did not know me. But you were my lover; you ought to have seen I was forced to deceive poor Raynal. How dare you believe your eyes; much more your ears, against my truth, against my honor; and then to believe such nonsense?" Then, with a grand assumption of superior knowledge, says she, "You little simpleton, how could the child be mine when I wasn't married at all?"

At this reproach, Edouard first stared, then grinned. "I forgot that," said he.

"Yes, and you forgot the moon isn't made of green cheese. However, if I saw you very humble, and very penitent, I might, perhaps, really forgive you--in time."

"No, forgive me at once. I don't understand your angelical, diabolical, incomprehensible sex: who on earth can? forgive me."

"Oh! oh! oh! oh!"

Lo! the tears that could not come at a remonstrance were flowing in a stream at his generosity.

"What is the matter now?" said he tenderly. She cried away, but at the same time explained,--

"What a f--f--foolish you must be not to see that it is I who am without excuse. You were my betrothed. It was to you I owed my duty; not my sister. I am a wicked, unhappy girl. How you must hate me!"

"I adore you. There, no more forgiving on either side. Let our only quarrel be who shall love the other best."

"Oh, I know how that will be," said the observant toad. "You will love me best till you have got me; and then I shall love you best; oh, ever so much."

However, the prospect of loving best did not seem disagreeable to her; for with this announcement she deposited her head on his shoulder, and in that attitude took a little walk with him up and down the Pleasaunce: sixty times; about eight miles.

These two were a happy pair. This wayward, but generous heart never forgot her offence, and his forgiveness. She gave herself to him heart and soul, at the altar, and well she redeemed her vow. He rose high in political life: and paid the penalty of that sort of ambition; his heart was often sore. But by his own hearth sat comfort and ever ready sympathy. Ay, and patient industry to read blue-books, and a ready hand and brain to write diplomatic notes for him, off which the mind glided as from a ball of ice.

In thirty years she never once mentioned the servants to him.

"Oh, let eternal honor crown her name!"

It was only a little bit of heel that Dard had left in Prussia. More fortunate than his predecessor (Achilles), he got off with a slight but enduring limp. And so the army lost him.

He married Jacintha, and Josephine set them up in Bigot's, (deceased) auberge. Jacintha shone as a landlady, and custom flowed in. For all that, a hankering after Beaurepaire was observable in her. Her favorite stroll was into the Beaurepaire kitchen, and on all fetes and grand occasions she was prominent in gay attire as a retainer of the house. The last specimen of her homely sagacity I shall have the honor to lay before you is a critique upon her husband, which she vented six years after marriage.

"My Dard," said she, "is very good as far as he goes. What he has felt himself, that he can feel for: nobody better. You come to him with an empty belly, or a broken head, or all bleeding with a cut, or black and blue, and you shall find a friend. But if it is a sore heart, or trouble, and sorrow, and no hole in your carcass to show for it, you had better come to me; for you might as well tell your grief to a stone wall as to my man."

The baroness took her son Raynal to Paris, and there, with keen eye, selected him a wife. She proved an excellent one. It would have been hard if she had not, for the baroness with the severe sagacity of her age and sex, had set aside as naught a score of seeming angels, before she could suit herself with a daughter-in-law. At first the Raynals very properly saw little of the Dujardins; but when both had been married some years, the recollection of that fleeting and nominal connection waxed faint, while the memory of great benefits conferred on both sides remained lively as ever in hearts so great, and there was a warm, a sacred friendship between the two houses--a friendship of the ancient Greeks, not of the modern club-house.

Camille and Josephine were blessed almost beyond the lot of humanity: none can really appreciate sunshine but those who come out of the cold dark. And so with happiness. For years they could hardly be said to live like mortals: they basked in bliss. But it was a near thing; for they but just scraped clear of life-long misery, and death's cold touch grazed them both as they went.

Yet they had heroic virtues to balance White Lies in the great Judge's eye.

A wholesome lesson, therefore, and a warning may be gathered from this story: and I know many novelists who would have preached that lesson at some length in every other chapter, and interrupted the sacred narrative to do it. But when I read stories so mutilated, I think of a circumstance related by Mr. Joseph Miller.

"An Englishman sojourning in some part of Scotland was afflicted with many hairs in the butter, and remonstrated. He was told, in reply, that the hairs and the butter came from one source--the cow; and that the just and natural proportions hitherto observed, could not be deranged, and bald butter invented--for one. 'So be it,' said the Englishman; 'but let me have the butter in one plate, and the hairs in another.'"

Acting on this hint, I have reserved some admirable remarks, reflections, discourses, and tirades, until the story should be ended, and the other plate be ready for the subsidiary sermon.

And now that the proper time is come, that love of intruding one's own wisdom in one's own person on the reader, which has marred so many works of art, is in my case restrained--first, by pure fatigue; secondly, because the moral of this particular story stands out so clear in the narrative, that he who runs may read it without any sermon at all.

Those who will not take the trouble to gather my moral from the living tree, would not lift it out of my dead basket: would not unlock their jaw-bones to bite it, were I to thrust it into their very mouths.

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