rotegee_. All which the poor lady had promised with a ready zeal that
surprised the minister.

"Indeed, I know too little, Doctor; I could wish she might be better
than I. May God make her so!"

"I do not judge you, Madame; it is not ours to judge; but I would keep
Adaly securely, if God permit, in the faith which we reverence here, and
which I much fear she could never learn in her own land or her own
language."

"May-be, may-be, my good Doctor; her faith shall not be disturbed by me,
I promise you."

Adele, with her quick ear and eye, has no difficulty in discovering the
ground of the Doctor's uneasiness and of Miss Eliza's frequent
questionings in regard to her intercourse with the new teacher.

"I am sure they think you very bad," she said to Madame Arles, one day,
in a spirit of mischief.

"Bad! bad! Adele, why? how?"--and that strange tortuous look came to her
eye, with a quick flush to her cheeks.

"Ah, now, dear Madame, don't be disturbed; 'tis only your religion they
think so bad, and fear you will mislead me. _Tenez!_ this little rosary"
(and she displays it to the eye of the wondering Madame Arles) "they
would have taken from me."

Madame pressed the beads reverently to her lips, while her manner
betrayed a deep religious emotion, (as it seemed to Adele,) which she
had rarely seen in her before.

"And you claimed it, my child?"

"Not for any faith I had in it; but it was my mother's."

The good woman kissed Adele.

"You must long to see her, my child!"

A shade of sorrow and doubt ran over the face of the girl. This did not
escape the notice of Madame Arles, who, with a terribly dejected and
distracted air, replaced the rosary in her hands.

"_Mon ange!_" (in this winsome way she was accustomed at times to
address Adele) "we cannot talk of these things. I have promised as much
to the Doctor; it is better so; he is a good man."

Adele sat toying for a moment with the rosary upon her fingers, looking
down; then, seeing that woe-begone expression that had fastened upon the
face of her companion, she sprang up, kissed her forehead, and,
restoring thus--as she knew she could do--a cheeriness to her manner,
resumed her lesson.

But from this time forth she showed an eagerness to unriddle, so far as
she might, the mystery of that faith which the Doctor clothed in his
ponderous discourses,--weighed down and oppressed by his prolixity, and
confounded by doctrines she could not comprehend, yet reco