him by Adelaide, who, timid and devoted to him, was quite deceived by
the assumed fits of temper, such as the least skilled lover and the most
guileless girl can affect; and which they constantly play off, as spoilt
children abuse the power they owe to their mother's affection. Thus all
familiarity between the girl and the old Count was soon put a stop to.
She understood the painter's melancholy, and the thoughts hidden in the
furrows on his brow, from the abrupt tone of the few words he spoke when
the old man unceremoniously kissed Adelaide's hands or throat.

Mademoiselle Leseigneur, on her part, soon expected her lover to give a
short account of all his actions; she was so unhappy, so restless when
Hippolyte did not come, she scolded him so effectually for his absence,
that the painter had to give up seeing his other friends, and now went
nowhere. Adelaide allowed the natural jealousy of women to be perceived
when she heard that sometimes at eleven o'clock, on quitting the house,
the painter still had visits to pay, and was to be seen in the most
brilliant drawing-rooms of Paris. This mode of life, she assured him,
was bad for his health; then, with the intense conviction to which the
accent, the emphasis and the look of one we love lend so much weight,
she asserted that a man who was obliged to expend his time and the
charms of his wit on several women at once could not be the object
of any very warm affection. Thus the painter was led, as much by the
tyranny of his passion as by the exactions of a girl in love, to live
exclusively in the little apartment where everything attracted him.

And never was there a purer or more ardent love. On both sides the same
trustfulness, the same delicacy, gave their passion increase without
the aid of those sacrifices by which many persons try to prove their
affection. Between these two there was such a constant interchange of
sweet emotion that they knew not which gave or received the most.

A spontaneous affinity made the union of their souls a close one. The
progress of this true feeling was so rapid that two months after the
accident to which the painter owed the happiness of knowing Adelaide,
their lives were one life. From early morning the young girl, hearing
footsteps overhead, could say to herself, "He is there." When Hippolyte
went home to his mother at the dinner hour he never failed to look in on
his neighbors, and in the evening he flew there at the accustomed hour