le's,
and I have long forgiven you that."

"Oh, yes, dear Rose: look what a color it has, and a fortnight ago it
was pale as ashes."

"Never mind; do you expect me to regret that?"

"Rose, I am a very bad woman."

"Are you, dear? then hook this for me."

"Yes, love. But I sometimes think you would forgive me if you knew how
hard I pray to be better. Rose, I do try so to be as unhappy as I ought;
but I can't, I can't. My cold heart seems as dead to unhappiness as once
it was to happiness. Am I a heartless woman after all?"

"Not altogether," said Rose dryly. "Fasten my collar, dear, and don't
torment yourself. You have suffered much and nobly. It was Heaven's
will: you bowed to it. It was not Heaven's will that you should be
blighted altogether. Bow in this, too, to Heaven's will: take things
as they come, and do cease to try and reconcile feelings that are too
opposite to live together."

"Ah! these are such comfortable words, Rose; but mamma will see this
dreadful color in my cheek, and what can I say to her?"

"Ten to one it will not be observed; and if it should, I will say it is
the excitement of seeing Edouard. Leave all to me."

Josephine greeted Edouard most affectionately, drew from him his whole
history, and petted him and sympathized with him deliciously, and made
him the hero of the evening. Camille, who was not naturally of a jealous
temper, bore this very well at first, but at last he looked so bitter
at her neglect of him, that Rose took him aside to soothe him. Edouard,
missing the auditor he most valued, and seeing her in secret conference
with the brilliant colonel, felt a return of the jealous pangs that
had seized him at first sight of the man; and so they played at cross
purposes.

At another period of the evening the conversation became more general;
and Edouard took a dislike to Colonel Dujardin. A young man of
twenty-eight nearly always looks on a boy of twenty-one with the air of
a superior, and this assumption, not being an ill-natured one, is apt to
be so easy and so undefined that the younger hardly knows how to resent
or to resist it. But Edouard was a little vain as we know; and the
Colonel jarred him terribly. His quick haughty eye jarred him. His
regimentals jarred him: they fitted like a glove. His mustache and his
manner jarred him, and, worst of all, his cool familiarity with Rose,
who seemed to court him rather than be courted by him. He put this act
of Rose's to the colon