gh all Madame
d'Argy's letters at this period the angelic figure of Giselle was
contrasted with the very different one of that young and incorrigible
little devil of a Jacqueline.

Fred at first believed his mother's stories were all exaggeration,
but the facts were there, corroborated by the continued silence of the
person concerned. He knew his mother to be too good wilfully to
blacken the character of one whom for years she had hoped would be her
daughter-in-law, the only child of her best friend, the early love of
her son. But by degrees he fancied that the love so long living at the
bottom of his heart was slowly dying, that it had been extinguished,
that nothing remained of it but remembrance, such remembrance as we
retain for dead things, a remembrance without hope, whose weight added
to the homesickness which with him was increasing every day.

There was no active service to enable him to endure exile. The heroic
period of the war had passed. Since a treaty of peace had been signed
with China, the fleet, which had distinguished itself in so many small
engagements and bombardments, had had nothing to do but to mount guard,
as it were, along a conquered coast. All round it in the bay, where it
lay at anchor, rose mountains of strange shapes, which seemed to shut
it into a kind of prison. This feeling of nothing to be done--of nothing
likely to be done, worked in Fred's head like a nightmare. The only
thing he thought of was how he could escape, when could he once more
kiss the faded cheeks of his mother, who often, when he slept or lay
wakeful during the long hours of the siesta, he saw beside him in tears.
Hers was the only face that he recalled distinctly; to her and to her
only were devoted his long reveries when on watch; that time when he
formerly composed his love verses, tender or angry, or full of despair.
That was all over! A sort of mournful resignation had succeeded his
bursts of excited feeling, his revolt against his fate.

This was Fred's state of mind when he received orders to return
home--orders as unexpected as everything seems to be in the life of a
naval man. "I am going back to her!" he cried. Her was his mother, her
was France. All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog. Jacqueline
was a phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old
times when he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the
China Sea; he had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he
h