e mere fables, good for empty heads with no proper
conception of life. Yet she remained entranced, dreaming unceasingly
of the knight Ivanhoe, loved so passionately by two women--Rebecca,
the beautiful Jewess, and the noble Lady Rowena. She herself thought
she could have loved with the intensity and patient serenity of the
latter maiden. To love! to love! She did not utter the words, but they
thrilled her through and through in the very thought, astonishing her,
and irradiating her face with a smile. In the distance some fleecy
cloudlets, driven by the breeze, now floated over Paris like a flock
of swans. Huge gaps were being cleft in the fog; a momentary glimpse
was given of the left bank, indistinct and clouded, like a city of
fairydom seen in a dream; but suddenly a thick curtain of mist swept
down, and the fairy city was engulfed, as though by an inundation. And
then the vapors, spreading equally over every district, formed, as it
were, a beautiful lake, with milky, placid waters. There was but one
denser streak, indicating the grey, curved course of the Seine. And
slowly over those milky, placid waters shadows passed, like vessels
with pink sails, which the young woman followed with a dreamy gaze. To
love! to love! She smiled as her dream sailed on.

However, she again took up her book. She had reached the chapter
describing the attack on the castle, wherein Rebecca nurses the
wounded Ivanhoe, and recounts to him the incidents of the fight, which
she gazes at from a window. Helene felt that she was in the midst of a
beautiful falsehood, but roamed through it as through some mythical
garden, whose trees are laden with golden fruit, and where she imbibed
all sorts of fancies. Then, at the conclusion of the scene, when
Rebecca, wrapped in her veil, exhales her love beside the sleeping
knight, Helene again allowed the book to slip from her hand; her heart
was so brimful of emotion that she could read no further.

Heavens! could all those things be true? she asked, as she lay back in
her easy-chair, numbed by her enforced quiescence, and gazing on
Paris, shrouded and mysterious, beneath the golden sun. The events of
her life now arose before her, conjured up by the perusal of the
novel. She saw herself a young girl in the house of her father,
Mouret, a hatter at Marseilles. The Rue des Petites-Maries was black
and dismal, and the house, with its vat of steaming water ready to the
hand of the hatter, exhaled a rank odor