you restore me to life," said Dumay, "but you
might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!"

"Swear to me," said her mother, "that you have not engaged a word or a
look with any young man."

"I can swear that, my dear mother," said Modeste, laughing, and looking
at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a mischievous
girl.

"She must be false indeed if you are right," cried Dumay, when Modeste
had left them and gone into the house.

"My daughter Modeste may have faults," said her mother, "but falsehood
is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true."

"Well! then let us feel easy," continued Dumay, "and believe that
misfortune has closed his account with us."

"God grant it!" answered Madame Mignon. "You will see _him_, Dumay; but
I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy."

CHAPTER XII. A DECLARATION OF LOVE,--SET TO MUSIC

At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father,
was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing
her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much larger
fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her new-found
ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the six millions
she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated by her two joys
and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she seated herself at
the piano, that confidant of so many young girls, who tell out their
wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing them by the notes and
tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his wife in the garden
under the windows, telling her the secret of their own wealth, and
questioning her as to her desires and her intentions. Madame Dumay had,
like her husband, no other family than the Mignons. Husband and wife
agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the Comte de La Bastie
really meant to live in Provence, and to leave their money to whichever
of Modeste's children might need it most.

"Listen to Modeste," said Madame Mignon, addressing them. "None but a
girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music."

Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant
lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a
maiden's love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming
acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently eat
through the globe, if nothing sto