talent for drawing, and by her beauty, that
element of superiority which produces its effect even upon very young
girls.

In the purer atmosphere of the boarding-school, she felt the keenest
pleasure in making herself womanly, in resuming her true sex, in
learning order, regularity, in a different sense from that inculcated
by the amiable dancer, whose kisses always retained a taste of rouge,
and whose embraces always left an impression of unnaturally round arms.
Pere Ruys was enchanted, every time that he went to see his daughter,
to find her more of a young lady, able to enter and walk about and
leave a room with the pretty courtesy that made all of Madame Belin's
boarders long for the _frou-frou_ of a long train.

At first he came often, then, as he lacked time for all the commissions
accepted and undertaken, the advances upon which helped to pay for the
disorder and heedlessness of his life, he was seen less frequently in
the parlor. At last disease took a hand. Brought to earth by hopeless
anaemia, for weeks he did not leave the house, nor work. He insisted
upon seeing his daughter; and from the peaceful, health-giving shadow
of the boarding-school Felicia returned to her father's studio, still
haunted by the same cronies, the parasites that cling to every
celebrity, among whom sickness had introduced a new figure in the
person of Dr. Jenkins.

That handsome, open face, the air of frankness and serenity diffused
over the whole person of that already well known physician, who talked
of his art so freely, yet performed miraculous cures, and his assiduous
attentions to her father, made a deep impression on the girl. Jenkins
soon became the friend, the confidant, a vigilant and gentle guardian.
Sometimes in the studio, when some one--the father himself most
frequently--made a too equivocal remark or a ribald jest, the Irishman
would frown and make a little noise with his lips, or else would divert
Felicia's attention. He often took her to pass the day with Madame
Jenkins, exerting himself to prevent her from becoming once more the
wild creature of the ante-boarding school days, or indeed the something
worse than that which she threatened to become, in the moral
abandonment, the saddest of all forms of abandonment, in which she was
left.

But the girl had a more powerful protector than the irreproachable but
worldly example of the fair Madame Jenkins: the art which she adored,
the enthusiasm it aroused in her esse