f a mother who finds a
child greatly and unexpectedly changed, broken with illness, or worn
out by want. A check supervened.

"Paul, Paul!" said a woman's hurried voice behind, "Paul, come into the
salon; I have yet a great many things to say to you--conversation for
the whole day--and so has Victor; and Josef is here. Come Paul, come to
your friends."

Madame Beck, brought to the spot by vigilance or an inscrutable
instinct, pressed so near, she almost thrust herself between me and M.
Emanuel.

"Come, Paul!" she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like
a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I
thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to
feel what defied suppression, I cried--

"My heart will break!"

What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another
fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the
whisper, "Trust me!" lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep
sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet
with relief--I wept.

"Leave her to me; it is a crisis: I will give her a cordial, and it
will pass," said the calm Madame Beck.

To be left to her and her cordial seemed to me something like being
left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply,
harshly, and briefly--"Laissez-moi!" in the grim sound I felt a music
strange, strong, but life-giving.

"Laissez-moi!" he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial
muscles all quivering as he spoke.

"But this will never do," said Madame, with sternness. More sternly
rejoined her kinsman--

"Sortez d'ici!"

"I will send for Pere Silas: on the spot I will send for him," she
threatened pertinaciously.

"Femme!" cried the Professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his
highest and most excited key, "Femme! sortez a l'instant!"

He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what
I had yet felt.

"What you do is wrong," pursued Madame; "it is an act characteristic of
men of your unreliable, imaginative temperament; a step impulsive,
injudicious, inconsistent--a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in
the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character."

"You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me," said he, "but
you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste," he continued less
fiercely, "be gentle, be pitying, be a woman; look at this poor face,
and relent. You know