cle say one day. "She
will be some day a beautiful, an enchanting woman--her mother was so when
she died at twenty, but she had been brought up differently. This one is
a little devotee. I am afraid of her. Her governess tells me she rises in
the night to pray." He said it with light laughter to some of his gay
friends by whom he had wished the child to be seen. He did not know that
his gayety filled her with fear and pain. She had been taught to believe
gayety worldly and sinful, and his whole life was filled with it. He had
brilliant parties--he did not go to church--he had no pensioners--he
seemed to think of nothing but pleasure. Poor little Saint Elizabeth
prayed for his soul many an hour when he was asleep after a grand dinner
or supper party.

He could not possibly have dreamed that there was no one of whom she
stood in such dread; her timidity increased tenfold in his presence.
When he sent for her and she went into the library to find him
luxurious in his arm chair, a novel on his knee, a cigar in his white
hand, a tolerant, half cynical smile on his handsome mouth, she could
scarcely answer his questions, and could never find courage to tell
what she so earnestly desired. She had found out early that Aunt
Clotilde and the _cure_ and the life they had led, had only aroused in
his mind a half-pitying amusement. It seemed to her that he did not
understand and had strange sacrilegious thoughts about them--he did not
believe in miracles--he smiled when she spoke of saints. How could she
tell him that she wished to spend all her money in building churches
and giving alms to the poor? That was what she wished to tell him--that
she wanted money to send back to the village, that she wanted to give
it to the poor people she saw in the streets, to those who lived in the
miserable places.

But when she found herself face to face with him and he said some witty
thing to her and seemed to find her only amusing, all her courage failed
her. Sometimes she thought she would throw herself upon her knees before
him and beg him to send her back to Normandy--to let her live alone in
the _chateau_ as her Aunt Clotilde had done.

One morning she arose very early, and knelt a long time before the little
altar she had made for herself in her dressing room. It was only a table
with some black velvet thrown over it, a crucifix, a saintly image, and
some flowers standing upon it. She had put on, when she got up, the
quaint black serge