d invalids are often addressed. Was she not something
of all these?

"Where were we?" he continued, when she was calmer. "You have made me
lose the thread. Read me all you have written."

Charlotte wiped her tears away.

"In a valley among the Pyrenees, those Pyrenees so rich in legendary
lore--"

"Go on."

"It is all," she answered.

The poet was very much surprised; it seemed to him that he had dictated
much more. The terrible advantage thought has over expression bewildered
him. All that he dreamed, all that was in embryo within his brain, he
fancied was already in form and on the page, and he was aghast at the
disproportion between the dream and the reality. His delusion was like
that of Don Quixote,--he believed himself in the Empyrean, and took the
vapors from the kitchen for the breath of heaven, and, seated on his
wooden horse, felt all the shock of an imaginary fall.. Had he been in
such a state of mental exaltation merely to produce those two lines?
Were these the only result of that frantic rubbing of his dishevelled
hair, of that weary pacing to and fro?'

He was furious, for he felt that he was ridiculous. "It is your fault,"
he said to Charlotte. "How can a man work in the face of a crying woman?
It is always the same thing--nothing is accomplished. Years pass away
and the places are filled. Do you not know how small a thing disturbs
literary composition? I ought to live in a tower a thousand feet above
all the futilities of life, instead of being surrounded by caprices,
disorder, and childishness." As he speaks he strikes a furious blow upon
the table, and poor Charlotte, with the tears pouring from her eyes,
gathers up the pens and papers that have flown about the room in wild
confusion.

The arrival of Dr. Hirsch ends this deplorable scene, and after a while
tranquillity is restored. The doctor is not alone; Labassandre comes
with him, and both are grave and mysterious in their manner.

Charlotte turns hastily. "What-news, doctor?" she asks.

"None, madame; no news whatever."

But Charlotte detected a covert glance at D'Argenton, and knew that the
physician's words were false.

"And what do the officers of the Company say?" continued the mother,
determined to learn the truth.

Labassandre undertook to answer, and while he spoke, the doctor
contrived to convey to D'Argenton that the Cydnus had gone to the
bottom",--"a collision at sea--every soul was lost."

D'Argenton's face never cha