sted; she repressed the flashing
of her glorious dark eyes, and made them soft even to humility. But her
failing health soon became noticeable. The duchess, an excellent mother,
though her piety was becoming more and more Portuguese, recognized a
moral cause in the physically weak condition in which Sabine now took
satisfaction. She knew the exact state of the relation between Beatrix
and Calyste; and she took great pains to draw her daughter to her own
house, partly to soothe the wounds of her heart, but more especially
to drag her away from the scene of her martyrdom. Sabine, however,
maintained the deepest silence for a long time about her sorrows,
fearing lest some one might meddle between herself and Calyste. She
declared herself happy! At the height of her misery she recovered her
pride, and all her virtues.

But at last, after some months during which her sister Clotilde and her
mother had caressed and petted her, she acknowledged her grief, confided
her sorrows, cursed life, and declared that she saw death coming
with delirious joy. She begged Clotilde, who was resolved to remain
unmarried, to be a mother to her little Calyste, the finest child that
any royal race could desire for heir presumptive.

One evening, as she sat with her young sister Athenais (whose marriage
to the Vicomte de Grandlieu was to take place at the end of Lent), and
with Clotilde and the duchess, Sabine gave utterance to the supreme
cries of her heart's anguish, excited by the pangs of a last
humiliation.

"Athenais," she said, when the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu departed at
eleven o'clock, "you are going to marry; let my example be a warning
to you. Consider it a crime to display your best qualities; resist the
pleasure of adorning yourself to please Juste. Be calm, dignified,
cold; measure the happiness you give by that which you receive. This
is shameful, but it is necessary. Look at me. I perish through my best
qualities. All that I _know_ was fine and sacred and grand within me,
all my virtues, were rocks on which my happiness is wrecked. I have
ceased to please because I am not thirty-six years old. In the eyes of
some men youth is thought an inferiority. There is nothing to imagine
on an innocent face. I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate
I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who
wants to hide her yellowing teeth. A fresh complexion is monotonous;
some men prefer their doll's wax made of r