should feel some envy at the
marriage Lucille was about to make with one whose competence report had
exaggerated into prodigal wealth, whose birth had been elevated from the
respectable to the noble, and whose handsome person was clothed, by the
interest excited by his misfortune, with the beauty of Antinous. Even
that misfortune, which ought to have levelled all distinctions, was not
sufficient to check the general envy; perhaps to some of the damsels
of Malines blindness in a husband would not have seemed an unwelcome
infirmity! But there was one in whom this envy rankled with a peculiar
sting: it was the beautiful, the all-conquering Julie! That the humble,
the neglected Lucille should be preferred to her; that Lucille, whose
existence was well-nigh forgot beside Julie's, should become thus
suddenly of importance; that there should be one person in the world,
and that person young, rich, handsome, to whom she was less than
nothing, when weighed in the balance with Lucille, mortified to the
quick a vanity that had never till then received a wound. "It is well,"
she would say with a bitter jest, "that Lucille's lover is blind. To be
the one it is necessary to be the other!"

During Lucille's absence she had been constantly in Madame le Tisseur's
house; indeed, Lucille had prayed her to be so. She had sought, with an
industry that astonished herself, to supply Lucille's place; and among
the strange contradictions of human nature, she had learned during her
efforts to please, to love the object of those efforts,--as much at
least as she was capable of loving.

She conceived a positive hatred to Lucille; she persisted in imagining
that nothing but the accident of first acquaintance had deprived her
of a conquest with which she persuaded herself her happiness had become
connected. Had St. Amand never loved Lucille and proposed to Julie, his
misfortune would have made her reject him, despite his wealth and his
youth; but to be Lucille's lover, and a conquest to be won from Lucille,
raised him instantly to an importance not his own. Safe, however, in his
affliction, the arts and beauty of Julie fell harmless on the fidelity
of St. Amand. Nay, he liked her less than ever, for it seemed an
impertinence in any one to counterfeit the anxiety and watchfulness of
Lucille.

"It is time, surely it is time, Madame le Tisseur, that Lucille should
return? She might have sold all the lace in Malines by this time," said
St. Amand, on