are very disagreeable to others. There is a Provence proverb which says:
Vaillance de Blacas, prudence de Pontevez, caprice de Corandeuil. If
there was not such a saying, it should be created for you, for you have
something incomprehensible enough in your character to make a saint
swear. If anybody should know you, it is I, who brought you up. I do not
wish to reproach you, but you gave me trouble enough; you were a most
wayward, capricious, and fantastic creature, a spoiled child--"

"Aunt," interrupted Clemence, with heightened color in her pale cheeks,
"you have told me of my faults often enough for me to know them, and, if
they were not corrected, it was not your fault, for you never spared me
scoldings. If I had not been so unfortunate as to lose my mother when I
was a baby, I should not have given you so much trouble."

Tears came into the young woman's eyes, but she had enough control over
herself to keep them from streaming down her burning cheeks. Taking a
journal from the table, she opened it, in order to conceal her emotion
and to put an end to this conversation, which had become painful to her.
Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, on her side, carefully replaced her
eye-glasses upon her nose, and, solemnly stretching herself upon her
chair, she turned over the leaves of the 'Gazette de France,' which she
had neglected so long.

Silence reigned for some moments in the room. The aunt apparently read
the paper very attentively. Her niece sat motionless, with her eyes
fastened upon the yellow cover of the last number of 'La Mode,' which had
chanced to fall into her hands. She aroused herself at last from her
revery and carelessly turned over the leaves of the review in a manner
which showed how little interest she felt in it. As she turned the first
page a surprised cry escaped her, and her eyes were fastened upon the
pamphlet with eager curiosity. Upon the frontispiece, where the Duchesse
de Berry's coat-of-arms is engraved, and in the middle of the shield,
which was left empty at this time by the absence of the usual fleurs de
lys, was sketched with a pencil a bird whose head was surmounted by a
baron's coronet.

Curious to know what could have caused her niece so much surprise,
Mademoiselle de Corandeuil stretched out her neck and gazed for an
instant upon the page without seeing, at first, anything extraordinary,
but finally her glance rested upon the armorial bearings, and she
discovered the new feature added to