led her eyes: then she rested her
forehead against his shoulder and let little Jean slide to the floor.

"Let us go back into the parlor," she said, after a pause.

Balthazar was exuberantly gay throughout the evening. He invented games
for the children, and played with such zest himself that he did not
notice two or three short absences made by his wife. About half-past
nine, when Jean had gone to bed, Marguerite returned to the parlor after
helping her sister Felicie to undress, and found her mother seated in
the deep armchair, and her father holding his wife's hand as he talked
to her. The young girl feared to disturb them, and was about to retire
without speaking, when Madame Claes caught sight of her, and said:--

"Come in, Marguerite; come here, dear child." She drew her down, kissed
her tenderly on the forehead, and said, "Carry your book into your own
room; but do not sit up too late."

"Good-night, my darling daughter," said Balthazar.

Marguerite kissed her father and mother and went away. Husband and wife
remained alone for some minutes without speaking, watching the last
glimmer of the twilight as it faded from the trees in the garden, whose
outlines were scarcely discernible through the gathering darkness.
When night had almost fallen, Balthazar said to his wife in a voice of
emotion,--

"Let us go upstairs."

Long before English manners and customs had consecrated the wife's
chamber as a sacred spot, that of a Flemish woman was impenetrable. The
good housewives of the Low Countries did not make it a symbol of
virtue. It was to them a habit contracted from childhood, a domestic
superstition, rendering the bedroom a delightful sanctuary of tender
feelings, where simplicity blended with all that was most sweet and
sacred in social life. Any woman in Madame Claes's position would have
wished to gather about her the elegances of life, but Josephine had done
so with exquisite taste, knowing well how great an influence the aspect
of our surroundings exerts upon the feelings of others. To a pretty
creature it would have been mere luxury, to her it was a necessity.
No one better understood the meaning of the saying, "A pretty woman is
self-created,"--a maxim which guided every action of Napoleon's first
wife, and often made her false; whereas Madame Claes was ever natural
and true.

Though Balthazar knew his wife's chamber well, his forgetfulness of
material things had lately been so complete that he felt