h she had sent by her faithful maid, Francoise Cochet,
to be engraved in Havre with these words, "Think of Bettina, 1827," and
placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to keep it there until
she married. Thus there had been between these two young girls a strange
commingling of bitter remorse and the artless visions of a fleeting
spring-time too early blighted by the keen north wind of desertion; yet
all their tears, regrets and memories were always subordinate to their
horror of evil.

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die under
a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the baseness of
her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by grief, had touched
the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone the Dumays and the
Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends can take the place
of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the dainty little Chalet,
surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay cultivated; the family
customs, as regular as clock-work, the provincial decorum, the games
at whist while the mother knitted and the daughter sewed, the silence,
broken only by the roar of the sea in the equinoctial storms,--all this
monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the
life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how
it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no
blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the
subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste
opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,--the
man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him
and ride away under the fire of Dumay's pistols.

During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung herself
into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in it. Born
to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German quite as
well as French; she had also, together with her sister, learned English
from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the matter of reading
by the people about her, who had no literary knowledge, Modeste fed her
soul on the modern masterpieces of three literatures, English, French,
and German. Lord Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine,
Crabbe, Moore, the great works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history,
drama, and fiction, from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's