r; and he gladly employed her as his secretary; he
made her copy his notes when some _confrere_ and friend, like Dr. Ramond
asked him to send him some document. But she was not a _savante_; he
simply forbade her to read what he deemed it useless that she should
know.

At last, perceiving her so completely absorbed in her work, his
attention was aroused.

"What is the matter with you, that you don't open your lips?" he said.
"Are you so taken up with the copying of those flowers that you can't
speak?"

This was another of the labors which he often intrusted to her--to make
drawings, aquarelles, and pastels, which he afterward used in his works
as plates. Thus, for the past five years he had been making some curious
experiments on a collection of hollyhocks; he had obtained a whole
series of new colorings by artificial fecundations. She made these sorts
of copies with extraordinary minuteness, an exactitude of design and
of coloring so extreme that he marveled unceasingly at the
conscientiousness of her work, and he often told her that she had a
"good, round, strong, clear little headpiece."

But, this time, when he approached her to look over her shoulder, he
uttered a cry of comic fury.

"There you are at your nonsense! Now you are off in the clouds again!
Will you do me the favor to tear that up at once?"

She straightened herself, her cheeks flushed, her eyes aglow with the
delight she took in her work, her slender fingers stained with the red
and blue crayon that she had crushed.

"Oh, master!"

And in this "master," so tender, so caressingly submissive, this term
of complete abandonment by which she called him, in order to avoid using
the words godfather or uncle, which she thought silly, there was, for
the first time, a passionate accent of revolt, the revindication of a
being recovering possession of and asserting itself.

For nearly two hours she had been zealously striving to produce an exact
and faithful copy of the hollyhocks, and she had just thrown on another
sheet a whole bunch of imaginary flowers, of dream-flowers, extravagant
and superb. She had, at times, these abrupt shiftings, a need of
breaking away in wild fancies in the midst of the most precise of
reproductions. She satisfied it at once, falling always into this
extraordinary efflorescence of such spirit and fancy that it never
repeated itself; creating roses, with bleeding hearts, weeping tears of
sulphur, lilies like crystal urns, fl