tional mind, the quick susceptibility to being
pleased, and the natural return which the heart makes in gratitude. If
it sometimes led to error--it was the more to be regretted. But I do not
touch on such views.

As the Jew's daughter had been rendered by her late adventure all but
the affianced bride of Lafontaine, she immediately assumed all the
rights of a bride, treated her slave as slaves are treated every where,
received his friends at her villa with animation, and opened her heart
to them all, from the old general downwards, even to me. I never had
seen a creature so joyous, with all her soul so speaking on her lips,
and all her happiness so sparkling in her eyes. She was the most
restless, too, of human beings; but it was the restlessness of a glow of
enjoyment, of a bird in the first sunshine, of a butterfly in the first
glitter of its wings. She was now continually forming some party, some
ingenious surprise of pleasure, some little sportive excursion, some
half theatric scene, to keep all our hearts and eyes as much alive as
her own. Lafontaine obviously did not like all this; and some keen
encounters of their wits took place, on the pleasure which, as he
averred, "she took in all society but his own."

"If the charge be true," said she one day, "why am I in fault? It is so
natural to try to be happy."

"But, to be happy without me, Mariamne."

"Ah, what an impossibility!" laughed the little foreigner.

"But, to receive the attentions even of the general, old enough to have
married your grandmother."

"Well, does it not show his taste, even in your own opinion, to follow
your example, and admire what you tell me _you_ worship?"

"You are changed; you are a _girouette_, Mariamne."

"Well, nothing in the world is so melancholy as one who lets all the
world pass by it, without a thought, a feeling, or a wish. One might as
well be one of the pictures in the Louvre, pretty and charming, and
gazed at by all the passers-by, without a glance for any of them, in
return. I have no kind of envy for being a mummy, covered with cloth of
gold, and standing in a niche of cedar, yet with all its sensations
vanished some thousand years ago."

"Was this the language you held to me when first we met, Mariamne?"

"Was this the language _you_ held to me, when first we met, Charles? But
I shall lose my spirits if I talk to you. What a sweet evening! What a
delicious breeze! _Bon soir_!" And forth she went, tripping it a