season
of mourning was fast passing, and that for us the world would wear a
brighter and more glorious aspect.

Such were the thoughts her dark eyes revealed to me, and such the hopes
I caught up from her proud features.

It is easy to colour a life of monotony; any hue may soon tinge the
outer surface, and thus mine speedily assumed a hopeful cast; not the
less decided, that the distance was lost in vague uncertainty. The
nature of my studies--and the pere kept me rigidly to the desk--offered
little to the discursiveness of fancy. The rudiments of Greek and
Latin, the lives of saints and martyrs, the litanies of the Church, the
invocations peculiar to certain holy-days, chiefly filled up my time,
when not sharing those menial offices which our poverty exacted from our
own hands.

Our life was of the very simplest; except a cup of coffee each morning
at daybreak, we took but one meal; our drink was always water. By what
means even the humble fare we enjoyed was procured I never knew, for I
never saw money in the pere's possession, nor did he ever appear to buy
anything.

For about two hours in the week I used to enjoy entire liberty, as the
pere was accustomed every Saturday to visit certain persons of his flock
who were too infirm to go abroad. On these occasions he would leave me
with some thoughtful injunction about reflection or pious meditation,
perhaps suggesting, for my amusement, the life of St. Vincent de Paul,
or some other of those adventurous spirits whose missions among the
Indians are so replete with heroic struggles; but still with free
permission for me to walk out at large and enjoy myself as I liked best.
We lived so near the outer boulevard that I could already see the open
country from our windows; but fair and enticing as seemed the sunny
slopes of Montmartre--bright as glanced the young leaves of spring in
the gardens at its foot--I ever turned my steps into the crowded city,
and sought the thoroughfares where the great human tide rolled fullest.

There were certain spots which held a kind of supernatural influence
over me--one of these was the Temple, another was the Place de Greve.
The window at which my father used to sit, from which, as a kind of
signal, I have so often seen his red kerchief floating, I never could
pass now, without stopping to gaze at--now, thinking of him who had been
its inmate; now, wondering who might be its present occupant. It needed
not the onward current of popul