every instant redundant joy and grace on all around her. Though the
bias of her nature was not to thought but to sympathy, yet was she
so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual persons by the
fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments, believing, as
she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves
noble."

And there were sometimes bits of her letters which drove him wild with
regret for what he had done.

"Is personal happiness, after all," she wrote once, "a very
important thing? Nothing can ever make me suffer again as I have
suffered, for I have learned to use a man's solace: work; work in
which I can go far away from myself and be as impersonal as a
problem in geometry. But I ask myself, Is that what was intended?
Sometimes I seem to touch the edge of the knowledge that it is
(perhaps) greater to be a sad, little, suffering, incompetent
mother, than to be the person which trouble and music have made of
me."

But in his self-abasement Frank failed to take into the accounting the
stupendous effect which the New York influences and the handling of
great affairs had had upon his own character. Day by day he had learned
more plainly the lessons of responsibility, of continued and
concentrated action, and even McDermott himself could not use Napoleon's
great question, "What has he done?" more meaningly than Frank himself
did now.

But with this new manhood came a finer comprehension of his baseness to
Katrine, and an emphasized doubt as to whether she ever could forgive
the miserable selfishness which he had displayed.

In his visits between the States and England (he made three during
Katrine's stay in Paris, besides the one in which he had met the
Countess de Nemours) he went from one side of the question to the other
in his thinking, wanting to visit Katrine, but realizing to the full
that Mademoiselle Dulany, a singer to the world, or Katrine, adopted
daughter of the Countess de Nemours, and a possible duchess, were worlds
removed from the little Irish girl who had loved him in the Carolina
woods. Fontainebleau! Fontainebleau! Since the day the Countess had told
him of Katrine's being there, the name repeated itself in his head like
a song. He remembered the silence of the great trees, the nightingales
at dusk among them, and dreamed of a day with Katrine there, hearing her
quaint humor, her daring spe