with joy at having made one friend amongst all their servants. Jacintha
stayed.

As months rolled on, Rose de Beaurepaire recovered her natural gayety in
spite of bereavement and poverty; so strong are youth, and health,
and temperament. But her elder sister had a grief all her own: Captain
Dujardin, a gallant young officer, well-born, and his own master, had
courted her with her parents' consent; and, even when the baron began to
look coldly on the soldier of the Republic, young Dujardin, though too
proud to encounter the baron's irony and looks of scorn, would not yield
love to pique. He came no more to the chateau, but he would wait hours
and hours on the path to the little oratory in the park, on the bare
chance of a passing word or even a kind look from Josephine. So much
devotion gradually won a heart which in happier times she had been half
encouraged to give him; and, when he left her on a military service
of uncommon danger, the woman's reserve melted, and, in that moment of
mutual grief and passion, she vowed she loved him better than all the
world.

Letters from the camp breathing a devotion little short of worship
fed her attachment; and more than one public mention of his name and
services made her proud as well as fond of the fiery young soldier.

Still she did not open her heart to her parents. The baron, alive at
that time, was exasperated against the Republic, and all who served it;
and, as for the baroness, she was of the old school: a passionate
love in a lady's heart before marriage was contrary to her notions of
etiquette. Josephine loved Rose very tenderly; but shrank with modest
delicacy from making her a confidante of feelings, the bare relation of
which leaves the female hearer a child no longer.

So she hid her heart, and delicious first love nestled deep in her
nature, and thrilled in every secret vein and fibre.

They had parted two years, and he had joined the army of the Pyrenees
about one month, when suddenly all correspondence ceased on his part.

Restless anxiety rose into terror as this silence continued; and
starting and trembling at every sound, and edging to the window at every
footstep, Josephine expected hourly the tidings of her lover's death.

Months rolled on in silence.

Then a new torture came. He must not be dead but unfaithful. At this all
the pride of her race was fired in her.

The struggle between love and ire was almost too much for nature:
violently gay and m