nd to-day again,
Aunt Louise, there it is, the smile, and there are the tears."

Marceline interrupted her talk, affectionately threw herself on her Aunt
Louise's neck, and kissed her with all her heart. She wiped away the
tears with kisses, and only the smile remained. Yes, Aunt Louise
remembered that she had had hard work to get as husband a certain
handsome officer of the Royal Guard, who was there present at the scene,
in an old decorated frame, standing up with his helmet on his head in a
martial attitude, leaning on the hilt of his cavalry sabre.

He, too, had been modern, that conqueror of the Trocadero, when he
entered Madrid in 1822 on the staff of the Duke of Angouleme. And she,
too, old Aunt Louise, had been modern, very modern, the day when, from
a window of the Palace of the Tuileries, during a military parade, she
had murmured this phrase in her mother's ear: "Mamma, there is the one I
love."

"Ah, how cowardly we are!" exclaimed Marceline, abruptly, changing her
tone. "Yes, how cowardly we are to love them--those, those dreadful men,
who know so little how to care for us. I say that for Gontran. What was
he doing while I was telling you my sorrows, Aunt Louise? Quite calmly
taking a trip around the world. But let him speak now, let him speak,
especially as I cannot any more. In all my life I have never made so
long a speech. Speak, sir; why were you going round the world?"

"Because your mother, on the morning of the day before you departed for
Aix-les-Bains, had had a very long conversation with me."

"And she had said to you?"

"She had said to me, 'Put a stop to this; marry her or go away, and let
her not hear of you again till her marriage.' And as I had for some time
been debating whether to take a little trip to Japan, I started for
Japan."

"He started for Japan! That goes without saying. You hear him, Aunt
Louise; he admits that this time last year he preferred to expatriate
himself rather than marry me. So there he was in America, in China, and
in Japan. This lasted ten months; from time to time, humbly and timidly,
I asked for news of him. He was very well; his last letter was from
Shanghai, or Sidney, or Java. For me, not a word, not a
remembrance--nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing!"

"I had promised your mother. One day at Yokohama I had bought you a lot
of fascinating little things. The box was done up and addressed to you
when I remembered my promise. I sent all those Japaneserie