youthful
indiscretions,--which to the sun of our love are like the clouds of the
dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See! feel my hand, it
burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it."

And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing
serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay,
who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to
Paris,--to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our
drama for a moment.

Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially
those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither
loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the
young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste's letter. Could
it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his
artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This flattery
is the flattery supreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the signature
of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it is the
divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to create it by
the power of an inward look,--is not that the highest reach of love?
And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture of an applauded
author, "At last I am beloved!" When a woman, be she maid, wife, or
widow, lets the charming words escape her, "Thou art handsome," the
words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull to their subtle
poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an everlasting tie to the
pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived judge; she becomes his
particular world, he thirsts for her continual testimony, and he never
wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince. Ernest walked proudly
up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter, full-face, and profile
attitude before the glass; he tried to criticise himself; but a voice,
diabolically persuasive, whispered to him, "Modeste is right." He took
up her letter and re-read it; he saw his fairest of the fair; he talked
with her; then, in the midst of his ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to
him:--

"She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!"

Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the
peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the
pavement.

"Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes," he cried;
"what a maddening situation I have put myself in!"

La Brier