ining. Small as was
the building, it was even too spacious for the few who came to worship.
The terror which prevailed on every side--the dread that devotion to
religion should be construed into an adherence to the monarchy, that
submission to God should be interpreted as an act of rebellion against
the sovereignty of human will--had gradually thinned the numbers, till
at last the few who came were only those whose afflictions had steeled
them against any reverses, and who were ready martyrs to whatever might
betide them. These were almost exclusively women--the mothers and wives
of those who had sealed their faith with their blood in the terrible
Place de Greve. Among them was one whose dress and appearance, although
not different from the rest, always created a movement of respect as she
passed in or out of the chapel. She was a very old lady, with hair white
as snow, and who led by the hand a little girl of about my own age; her
large dark eyes and brilliant complexion giving her a look of unearthly
beauty in that assemblage of furrowed cheeks, and eyes long dimmed by
weeping. It was not alone that her features were beautifully regular, or
that their lines were fashioned in the very perfection of symmetry, but
there was a certain character in the expression of the face so different
from all around it, as to be almost electrical in effect. Untouched by
the terrible calamities that weighed on every heart, she seemed, in
the glad buoyancy of her youth, to be at once above the very reach of
sorrow, like one who bore a charmed fate, and whom Fortune had exempted
from all the trials of this life. So at least did I read those features,
as they beamed upon me in such a contrast to the almost stern character
of the sad and sorrow-struck faces of the rest.

It was a part of my duty to place a footstool each morning for the
'Marquise,' as she was distinctively called, and on these occasions
it was that I used to gaze upon that little girl's face with a kind of
admiring wonder that lingered in my heart for hours after. The bold
look with which she met mine, if it at first half abashed, at length
encouraged me; and as I stole noiselessly away, I used to feel as though
I carried with me some portion of that high hope which bounded within
her own heart. Strange magnetism! it seemed as though her spirit
whispered to me not to be downhearted or depressed--that the sorrows of
life came and went as shadows pass over the earth--that the