er Charles's departure,--having
made a vow to hear it daily,--Eugenie bought a map of the world, which
she nailed up beside her looking-glass, that she might follow her cousin
on his westward way, that she might put herself, were it ever so little,
day by day into the ship that bore him, and see him and ask him a
thousand questions,--"Art thou well? Dost thou suffer? Dost thou think
of me when the star, whose beauty and usefulness thou hast taught me
to know, shines upon thee?" In the mornings she sat pensive beneath the
walnut-tree, on the worm-eaten bench covered with gray lichens, where
they had said to each other so many precious things, so many trifles,
where they had built the pretty castles of their future home. She
thought of the future now as she looked upward to the bit of sky which
was all the high walls suffered her to see; then she turned her eyes
to the angle where the sun crept on, and to the roof above the room in
which he had slept. Hers was the solitary love, the persistent love,
which glides into every thought and becomes the substance, or, as our
fathers might have said, the tissue of life. When the would-be friends
of Pere Grandet came in the evening for their game at cards, she was gay
and dissimulating; but all the morning she talked of Charles with her
mother and Nanon. Nanon had brought herself to see that she could pity
the sufferings of her young mistress without failing in her duty to the
old master, and she would say to Eugenie,--

"If I had a man for myself I'd--I'd follow him to hell, yes, I'd
exterminate myself for him; but I've none. I shall die and never know
what life is. Would you believe, mamz'elle, that old Cornoiller (a good
fellow all the same) is always round my petticoats for the sake of my
money,--just for all the world like the rats who come smelling after the
master's cheese and paying court to you? I see it all; I've got a shrewd
eye, though I am as big as a steeple. Well, mamz'elle, it pleases me,
but it isn't love."

X

Two months went by. This domestic life, once so monotonous, was now
quickened with the intense interest of a secret that bound these women
intimately together. For them Charles lived and moved beneath the
grim gray rafters of the hall. Night and morning Eugenie opened the
dressing-case and gazed at the portrait of her aunt. One Sunday morning
her mother surprised her as she stood absorbed in finding her cousin's
features in his mother's face. Madam