e downfall, which forever thrust
them out of her social sphere.

"Ah! well," resumed Beauchene, "I've only one boy, but he's a sturdy
fellow, I warrant it; isn't he, Mathieu?"

These words had scarcely passed his lips when he must have regretted
them. His eyelids quivered and a little chill came over him as his
glance met that of his former designer. For in the latter's clear eyes
he beheld, as it were, a vision of that other son, Norine's ill-fated
child, who had been cast into the unknown. Then there came a pause, and
amid the shrill cries of the boys and girls playing at hide-and-seek
a number of little shadows flitted through the sunlight: they were the
shadows of the poor doomed babes who scarce saw the light before they
were carried off from homes and hospitals to be abandoned in corners,
and die of cold, and perhaps even of starvation!

Mathieu had been unable to answer a word. And his emotion increased
when he noticed Morange huddled up on a chair, and gazing with blurred,
tearful eyes at little Gervais, who was laughingly toddling hither and
thither. Had a vision come to him also? Had the phantom of his dead
wife, shrinking from the duties of motherhood and murdered in a hateful
den, risen before him in that sunlit garden, amid all the turbulent
mirth of happy, playful children?

"What a pretty girl your daughter Reine is!" said Mathieu, in the hope
of drawing the accountant from his haunting remorse. "Just look at her
running about!--so girlish still, as if she were not almost old enough
to be married."

Morange slowly raised his head and looked at his daughter. And a smile
returned to his eyes, still moist with tears. Day by day his adoration
increased. As Reine grew up he found her more and more like her mother,
and all his thoughts became centred in her. His one yearning was that
she might be very beautiful, very happy, very rich. That would be a sign
that he was forgiven--that would be the only joy for which he could
yet hope. And amid it all there was a vague feeling of jealousy at the
thought that a husband would some day take her from him, and that he
would remain alone in utter solitude, alone with the phantom of his dead
wife.

"Married?" he murmured; "oh! not yet. She is only fourteen."

At this the others expressed surprise: they would have taken her to be
quite eighteen, so womanly was her precocious beauty already.

"As a matter of fact," resumed her father, feeling flattered, "she has
a