ster of
Finance. Mademoiselle de Crequy was thus introduced into all the free-
thinking salons of Paris; among people who were always full of plans for
subverting society. 'And did Clement affect such people?' Madame de
Crequy had asked with some anxiety. No! Monsieur de Crequy had neither
eyes nor ears, nor thought for anything but his cousin, while she was by.
And she? She hardly took notice of his devotion, so evident to every one
else. The proud creature! But perhaps that was her haughty way of
concealing what she felt. And so Madame de Crequy listened, and
questioned, and learnt nothing decided, until one day she surprised
Clement with the note in his hand, of which she remembered the stinging
words so well, in which Virginie had said, in reply to a proposal Clement
had sent her through her father, that 'When she married she married a
man, not a petit-maitre.'

"Clement was justly indignant at the insulting nature of the answer
Virginie had sent to a proposal, respectful in its tone, and which was,
after all, but the cool, hardened lava over a burning heart. He
acquiesced in his mother's desire, that he should not again present
himself in his uncle's salons; but he did not forget Virginie, though he
never mentioned her name.

"Madame de Crequy and her son were among the earliest proscrits, as they
were of the strongest possible royalists, and aristocrats, as it was the
custom of the horrid Sansculottes to term those who adhered to the habits
of expression and action in which it was their pride to have been
educated. They had left Paris some weeks before they had arrived in
England, and Clement's belief at the time of quitting the Hotel de Crequy
had certainly been, that his uncle was not merely safe, but rather a
popular man with the party in power. And, as all communication having
relation to private individuals of a reliable kind was intercepted,
Monsieur de Crequy had felt but little anxiety for his uncle and cousin,
in comparison with what he did for many other friends of very different
opinions in politics, until the day when he was stunned by the fatal
information that even his progressive uncle was guillotined, and learnt
that his cousin was imprisoned by the licence of the mob, whose rights
(as she called them) she was always advocating.

"When I had heard all this story, I confess I lost in sympathy for
Clement what I gained for his mother. Virginie's life did not seem to me
worth the risk t