ooner or later in that great, wicked city,
and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like
your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid--" here the poor
little woman broke down and began to cry like Leonie, but less
violently--"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted
and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera,
Leonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself."

"I will die first," answered Leonie. "I wish I had never been born."

"Don't tell your father, Leonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the
conversation ended.

"What's the matter with Leonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after
his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a
welcome. What ails the child?"

"She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels
sad at leaving Helene and me," replied his sister.

"She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel.

The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new
impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and
mobile as Leonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical
studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire.
Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her
husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his
urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and
seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a
gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with
Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear
blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so
delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and
afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which
reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and
direful headache _in terrorem_; and the colonel thought he was polite to
me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture
to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most
elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that
her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant
colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and
which heightened the beauty of Leonie, extinguished the delicate color
and s