replied, with a touch of
melancholy.

"Josephine was not to compare with you!" said he. "Come; I will play a
game of whist with my brother and the children. I must try my hand at
the business of a family man; I must get Hortense a husband, and bury
the libertine."

His frankness so greatly touched poor Adeline, that she said:

"The creature has no taste to prefer any man in the world to my Hector.
Oh, I would not give you up for all the gold on earth. How can any woman
throw you over who is so happy as to be loved by you?"

The look with which the Baron rewarded his wife's fanaticism confirmed
her in her opinion that gentleness and docility were a woman's strongest
weapons.

But in this she was mistaken. The noblest sentiments, carried to an
excess, can produce mischief as great as do the worst vices. Bonaparte
was made Emperor for having fired on the people, at a stone's throw from
the spot where Louis XVI. lost his throne and his head because he would
not allow a certain Monsieur Sauce to be hurt.

On the following morning, Hortense, who had slept with the seal under
her pillow, so as to have it close to her all night, dressed very early,
and sent to beg her father to join her in the garden as soon as he
should be down.

By about half-past nine, the father, acceding to his daughter's
petition, gave her his arm for a walk, and they went along the quays by
the Pont Royal to the Place du Carrousel.

"Let us look into the shop windows, papa," said Hortense, as they went
through the little gate to cross the wide square.

"What--here?" said her father, laughing at her.

"We are supposed to have come to see the pictures, and over there"--and
she pointed to the stalls in front of the houses at a right angle to
the Rue du Doyenne--"look! there are dealers in curiosities and
pictures----"

"Your cousin lives there."

"I know it, but she must not see us."

"And what do you want to do?" said the Baron, who, finding himself
within thirty yards of Madame Marneffe's windows, suddenly remembered
her.

Hortense had dragged her father in front of one of the shops forming the
angle of a block of houses built along the front of the Old Louvre, and
facing the Hotel de Nantes. She went into this shop; her father stood
outside, absorbed in gazing at the windows of the pretty little lady,
who, the evening before, had left her image stamped on the old beau's
heart, as if to alleviate the wound he was so soon to receive;