e added, motioning to Jacques and Madeleine.

The latter, just fifteen, had come victoriously out of her struggle with
anaemia, and was now a woman. She had grown tall; the Bengal roses were
blooming in her once sallow cheeks. She had lost the unconcern of a
child who looks every one in the face, and now dropped her eyes; her
movements were slow and infrequent, like those of her mother; her figure
was slim, but the gracefulness of the bust was already developing;
already an instinct of coquetry had smoothed the magnificent black hair
which lay in bands upon her Spanish brow. She was like those pretty
statuettes of the Middle Ages, so delicate in outline, so slender in
form that the eye as it seizes their charm fears to break them. Health,
the fruit of untold efforts, had made her cheeks as velvety as a peach
and given to her throat the silken down which, like her mother's,
caught the light. She was to live! God had written it, dear bud of the
loveliest of human flowers, on the long lashes of her eyelids, on the
curve of those shoulders which gave promise of a development as superb
as her mother's! This brown young girl, erect as a poplar, contrasted
with Jacques, a fragile youth of seventeen, whose head had grown
immensely, causing anxiety by the rapid expansion of the forehead, while
his feverish, weary eyes were in keeping with a voice that was deep and
sonorous. The voice gave forth too strong a volume of tone, the eye too
many thoughts. It was Henriette's intellect and soul and heart that were
here devouring with swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques
had the milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English
women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,--an appearance of
health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette,
after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical
figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis,
I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was
thankful for the self-deception of his mother.

"When I see my children thus, happiness stills my griefs--just as
those griefs are dumb, and even disappear, when I see them failing. My
friend," she said, her eyes shining with maternal pleasure, "if other
affections fail us, the feelings rewarded here, the duties done and
crowned with success, are compensation enough for defeat elsewhere.
Jacques will be, like you, a man of the highest education,