ood friend, if you were a musician you would have heard, as I
have, the language of love that Modeste speaks."

The piano of the demoiselles Mignon was among the few articles of
furniture which had been moved from the town-house to the Chalet.
Modeste often conjured away her troubles by practising, without a
master. Born a musician, she played to enliven her mother. She sang
by nature, and loved the German airs which her mother taught her. From
these lessons and these attempts at self-instruction came a phenomenon
not uncommon to natures with a musical vocation; Modeste composed, as
far as a person ignorant of the laws of harmony can be said to compose,
tender little lyric melodies. Melody is to music what imagery and
sentiment are to poetry, a flower that blossoms spontaneously.
Consequently, nations have had melodies before harmony,--botany comes
later than the flower. In like manner, Modeste, who knew nothing of
the painter's art except what she had seen her sister do in the way of
water-color, would have stood subdued and fascinated before the
pictures of Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Durer,
Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands. Lately,
for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of nightingales,
musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused the attention of
her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness for composition
and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.

"If your suspicions have no other foundation," said Latournelle to
Madame Mignon, "I pity your susceptibilities."

"When a Breton girl sings," said Dumay gloomily, "the lover is not far
off."

"I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising," said the mother,
"and you shall judge for yourselves--"

"Poor girl!" said Madame Dumay, "If she only knew our anxiety she would
be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially if she
thought it would save Dumay."

"My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow," said Madame Mignon;
"perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have discovered by
trickery."

Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is
everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies, these
honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being able to
ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-affair, or
the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the result of