re reliable than
Boulevard des Italiens. Moreover, it was very near the Bois de
Boulogne, and if the fashionable world should once begin to pass that
way--That fashionable society which her mother so affected was
Mademoiselle Henriette's fixed idea; and she was amazed that the
thought of receiving _high-life_ in his little fifth-floor studio,
about as large as a diving-bell, should make their neighbor laugh. Why,
only a week or two before, a carriage came there with servants in
livery. Sometimes, too, he had had a "very swell" visitor.

"Oh! a real great lady," Grandmamma chimed in. "We were at the window
waiting for father. We saw her leave the carriage and look at the
frame; we thought surely she came to see you."

"She did come to see me," said Andre, a little embarrassed.

"For a moment we were afraid she would go on as so many others do, on
account of your five flights. So we all four did our best to stop her,
to magnetize her with our four pairs of wide-open eyes. We pulled her
very gently by the feathers in her hat and the lace on her cape. 'Come
upstairs, pray, madame, pray come upstairs,' and finally she came.
There is so much magnetism in eyes that want a thing very much!"

Surely she had magnetism enough, the dear creature, not only in her
eyes, which were of uncertain hue, veiled or laughing like the sky of
her Paris, but in her voice, in the folds of her dress, in everything,
even to the long curl that shaded her straight, graceful statue-like
neck and attracted you by its tapering shaded point, deftly curled over
a supple finger.

The tea being duly served, while the gentlemen continued their talking
and drinking--Pere Joyeuse was always very slow in everything that he
did, because of his abrupt excursions into the moon--the girls resumed
their work, the table was covered with wicker baskets, embroidery,
pretty wools whose brilliant coloring brightened the faded flowers in
the old carpet, and the group of the other evening was formed anew in
the luminous circle of the lamp shade, to the great satisfaction of
Paul de Gery. It was the first evening of that sort he had passed in
Paris; it reminded him of other far-away evenings, cradled by the same
innocent mirth, the pleasant sound of scissors laid upon the table, of
the needle piercing the cotton, or the rustling of the leaves of a book
as they are turned, and dear faces, vanished forever, clustered in the
same way around the family lamp, alas! so sudd