faithful heart.

Lovers! Pray for him!

* * * * *

As she finished this narrative, Mademoiselle de Watteville's cheeks were
on fire; there was a fever in her blood. She was crying--but with rage.
This little novel, inspired by the literary style then in fashion, was
the first reading of the kind that Rosalie had ever had the chance of
devouring. Love was depicted in it, if not by a master-hand, at any
rate by a man who seemed to give his own impressions; and truth, even if
unskilled, could not fail to touch a virgin soul. Here lay the secret
of Rosalie's terrible agitation, of her fever and her tears; she was
jealous of Francesca Colonna.

She never for an instant doubted the sincerity of this poetical flight;
Albert had taken pleasure in telling the story of his passion, while
changing the names of persons and perhaps of places. Rosalie was
possessed by infernal curiosity. What woman but would, like her, have
wanted to know her rival's name--for she too loved! As she read these
pages, to her really contagious, she had said solemnly to herself, "I
love him!"--She loved Albert, and felt in her heart a gnawing desire to
fight for him, to snatch him from this unknown rival. She reflected that
she knew nothing of music, and that she was not beautiful.

"He will never love me!" thought she.

This conclusion aggravated her anxiety to know whether she might not be
mistaken, whether Albert really loved an Italian Princess, and was
loved by her. In the course of this fateful night, the power of swift
decision, which had characterized the famous Watteville, was fully
developed in his descendant. She devised those whimsical schemes, round
which hovers the imagination of most young girls when, in the solitude
to which some injudicious mothers confine them, they are roused by
some tremendous event which the system of repression to which they are
subjected could neither foresee nor prevent. She dreamed of descending
by a ladder from the kiosk into the garden of the house occupied by
Albert; of taking advantage of the lawyer's being asleep to look through
the window into his private room. She thought of writing to him, or of
bursting the fetters of Besancon society by introducing Albert to the
drawing-room of the Hotel de Rupt. This enterprise, which to the Abbe de
Grancey even would have seemed the climax of the impossible, was a mere
passing thought.

"Ah!" said she to herself, "my father has a dispute pending as to his
lan