ave disturbed her position
with the Bowriggs or interrupted relations with her city patrons.

In Ashfield the case was far different.

Adele, accompanied by her friend Rose,--who, notwithstanding the quiet
remonstrances of the Doctor, had won her mother's permission for such
equipment in French as she could gain from a summer's teaching,--went
with early greeting to the Bowriggs. The curiosity of Adele was intense
to listen to the music of her native speech once more; and when Madame
Arles slipped quietly into the room, Adele darted toward her with warm,
girlish impulse, and the poor woman, excited beyond bounds by this
heartiness of greeting, and murmuring some tender words of endearment,
had presently folded her to her bosom.

Adele, blushing as much with pleasure as with a half-feeling of
mortification at the wild show of feeling she had made, was stammering
her apology, when she was arrested by a sudden change in the aspect of
her new friend.

"My dear Madame, you are suffering?"

"A little, my child!"

It was too true, as the quick glance of her old pupils saw in an
instant. Her lips were pinched and blue; that strange double look in her
eyes,--one fastened upon Adele, and the other upon vacancy; her hands
clasped over her heart as if to stay its mad throbbings. While Sophie
supported and conducted the sufferer to her own chamber, the younger
sister explained to Adele that such spasmodic attacks were of frequent
occurrence, and their physician had assured them must, at a very early
day, destroy her.

Nothing more was needed to enlist Adele's sympathies to the full. She
carried home the story of it to the Doctor, and detailed it in such an
impassioned way, and with such interpretation of the kind lady's
reception of herself, that the Doctor was touched, and abated no small
measure of the prejudice he had been disposed to entertain against the
Frenchwoman.

But her heresies in the matter of religion remained,--it being no secret
that Madame Arles was thoroughly Popish; and these disturbed the good
Doctor the more, as he perceived the growing and tender intimacy which
was establishing itself, week by week, between Adele and her new
teacher. Indeed, he has not sanctioned this without his own private
conversation with Madame, in which he has set forth his responsibility
respecting Adele and the wishes of her father, and insisted upon entire
reserve of Madame's religious opinions in her intercourse with his
_p