reach,
as it were, between water and sky? One would better be a widow. Widows,
at any rate, can marry again. But you, Giselle, don't understand these
things. You are going to be a nun."

"Had I been in your place, Fred," said Isabelle Ray, "I should rather
have gone into the cavalry school at Saint Cyr. I should have wanted to
be a good huntsman, had I been a man, and they say naval officers are
never good horsemen."

Poor Fred! He was not making much progress among the young girls. Almost
everything people talked about outside his cadet life was unknown to
him; what he could talk about seemed to have no interest for any one,
unless indeed it might interest Giselle, who was an adept in the art of
sympathetic listening, never having herself anything to say.

Besides this, Fred was by no means at his ease in talking to Jacqueline.
They had been told not to 'tutoyer' each other, because they were
getting too old for such familiarity, and it was he, and not she, who
remembered this prohibition. Jacqueline perceived this after a while,
and burst out laughing:

"Tiens! You call me 'you,"' she cried, "and I ought not to say
'thou' but 'you.' I forgot. It seems so odd, when we have always been
accustomed to 'tutoyer' each other."

"One ought to give it up after one's first communion," said the eldest
Mademoiselle Wermant, sententiously. "We ceased to 'tutoyer' our boy
cousins after that. I am told nothing annoys a husband so much as to
see these little familiarities between his wife and her cousins or her
playmates."

Giselle looked very much astonished at this speech, and her air of
disapproval amused Belle and Yvonne exceedingly. They began presently to
talk of the classes in which they were considered brilliant pupils,
and of their success in compositions. They said that sometimes very
difficult subjects were given out. A week or two before, each had had
to compose a letter purporting to be from Dante in exile to a friend in
Florence, describing Paris as it was in his time, especially the manners
and customs of its universities, ending by some allusion to the state of
matters between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

"Good heavens! And could you do it?" said Giselle, whose knowledge of
history was limited to what may be found in school abridgments.

It was therefore a great satisfaction to her when Fred declared that he
never should have known how to set about it.

"Oh! papa helped me a little," said Isabelle, wh