s breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate
man may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant,
mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he
confided to his mother the secret of his heart.

Isaura had refused him--that refusal had made him desperate.

"Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how
healthful!" His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him
and cheer his drooping spirits.

She told him of Isaura's messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau,
who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his
mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. "She could not do less,"
he said. "Has no one offered to do more?"--he thought of Julie when he
asked that--Madame Rameau hesitated.

The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before
my book closes, I shall have to preach--no, not to preach, but to
imply--plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best
to take them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people,
for what they are.

I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian bourgeoisie are
as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not
an uncommon type of her class. She had been when she first married
singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty;
and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper--very
plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly
attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue.
Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more
faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau
hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more
than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.

After that hesitating pause she said, "Yes--a young lady calling herself
Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your
nurse. When I said, 'But I am his mother--he needs no other nurses,' she
would have retreated, and looked ashamed--poor thing! I don't blame her
if she loved my son. But, my son, I say this,--if you love her, don't
talk to me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle
Cicogna, why, then your father will take care that the poor girl
who loved you not knowing that you loved another is not left to the
temptation of penury."

Rameau's pale lips withered in