l, costly, burdened by fears, poisoned by remorse, or
blackened by despair. The love in the heart of Marguerite and Emmanuel,
as yet unknown to them for love, the sentiment that budded into life
beneath the gloomy arches of the picture-gallery, beside the stern old
abbe, in a still and silent moment, that love so grave and so discreet,
yet rich in tender depths, in secret delights that were luscious to the
taste as stolen grapes snatched from a corner of the vineyard, wore in
coming years the sombre browns and grays that surrounded the hour of its
birth.

Fearing to give expression to their feelings beside that bed of pain,
they unconsciously increased their happiness by a concentration which
deepened its imprint on their hearts. The devotion of the daughter,
shared by Emmanuel, happy in thus uniting himself with Marguerite and
becoming by anticipation the son of her mother, was their medium
of communication. Melancholy thanks from the lips of the young girl
supplanted the honeyed language of lovers; the sighing of their
hearts, surcharged with joy at some interchange of looks, was scarcely
distinguishable from the sighs wrung from them by the mother's
sufferings. Their happy little moments of indirect avowal, of unuttered
promises, of smothered effusion, were like the allegories of Raphael
painted on a black ground. Each felt a certainty that neither avowed;
they knew the sun was shining over them, but they could not know what
wind might chase away the clouds that gathered about their heads. They
doubted the future; fearing that pain would ever follow them, they
stayed timidly among the shadows of the twilight, not daring to say to
each other, "Shall we end our days together?"

The tenderness which Madame Claes now testified for her children nobly
concealed much that she endeavored to hide from herself. Her children
caused her neither fear nor passionate emotion: they were her
comforters, but they were not her life: she lived by them; she died
through Balthazar. However painful her husband's presence might be to
her, lost as he was for hours together in depths of thought from which
he looked at her without seeing her, it was only during those cruel
moments that she forgot her griefs. His indifference to the dying woman
would have seemed criminal to a stranger, but Madame Claes and her
daughters were accustomed to it; they knew his heart and they forgave
him. If, during the daytime, Josephine was seized by some sudden