iant
beauty of its occupants it became known from all other volantes as
the "meteor."

Frowenfeld's visits were not infrequent; he insisted on Clotdlde's
knowing just what was being done with her money. Without indulging
ourselves in the pleasure of contemplating his continued mental
unfolding, we may say that his growth became more rapid in this season
of universal expansion; love had entered into his still compacted soul
like a cupid into a rose, and was crowding it wide open. However, as
yet, it had not made him brave. Aurora used to slip out of the
drawing-room, and in some secluded nook of the hall throw up her clasped
hands and go through all the motions of screaming merriment.

"The little fool!"--it was of her own daughter she whispered this
complimentary remark--"the little fool is afraid of the fish!"

"You!" she said to Clotilde, one evening after Joseph had gone, "you
call yourself a Creole girl!"

But she expected too much. Nothing so terrorizes a blushing girl as a
blushing man. And then--though they did sometimes digress--Clotilde and
her partner met to talk "business" in a purely literal sense.

Aurora, after a time, had taken her money into her own keeping.

"You mighd gid robb' ag'in, you know, 'Sieur Frowenfel'," she said.

But when he mentioned Clotilde's fortune as subject to the same
contingency, Aurora replied:

"Ah! bud Clotilde mighd gid robb'!"

But for all the exuberance of Aurora's spirits, there was a cloud in her
sky. Indeed, we know it is only when clouds are in the sky that we get
the rosiest tints; and so it was with Aurora. One night, when she had
heard the wicket in the _porte-cochere_ shut behind three evening
callers, one of whom she had rejected a week before, another of whom she
expected to dispose of similarly, and the last of whom was Joseph
Frowenfeld, she began such a merry raillery at Clotilde and such a
hilarious ridicule of the "Professor" that Clotilde would have wept
again had not Aurora, all at once, in the midst of a laugh, dropped her
face in her hands and run from the room in tears. It is one of the
penalties we pay for being joyous, that nobody thinks us capable of care
or the victim of trouble until, in some moment of extraordinary
expansion, our bubble of gayety bursts. Aurora had been crying of
nights. Even that same night, Clotilde awoke, opened her eyes and beheld
her mother risen from the pillow and sitting upright in the bed beside
her; the moon, shi