de me fear. Minister! Do you know what I have
been thinking of since I was made a minister?"

"Of what have you been thinking?" asked the young wife, who, with her
hands folded, gazed trustingly and sweetly into Sulpice's feverish eyes.

"I?--I have been telling myself that it is not enough to be a minister.
One must be a great minister! You understand, Adrienne, a great
minister!"

As he spoke he took Adrienne's hands in his, and the young wife glanced
up admiringly at this young man burning with hope, who stood there
before her, declaring: "I will be great!"

She had never dreamed of his reaching such heights as these on that day
when she felt the fingers of her fiance trembling in her hand, the day
that Sulpice had whispered the words in her ear which made her heart
leap with joy: "I love you, Adrienne, I shall always love you--Always!"

III

Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love. She brought to him from
the convent at Grenoble where she had been educated, the charming
innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman. She was an
orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only
moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even
inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal
demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gerard.

He had met her at more than one soiree at Grenoble, where she appeared
timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her
sweet glance. Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had
listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society,
had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty
blonde--so sweet and gentle--the childlike timidity of this young girl,
something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming
creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely. He was free, and
alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he
loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double
sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the
patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.

He remembered only his father's dreamy and refined face in the portrait
of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer's black gown, before which he
had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a
prayer, the four letters: _papa_. Alone in this little town of Greno