forehead, took her hands and pressed them, and
testified his joy by fondling caresses which to Marguerite seemed almost
obsequious. During the dinner he thought only of her; he looked at
her eagerly with the assiduous devotion displayed by a lover to his
mistress: if she made a movement, he tried to divine her wish, and
rose to fulfil it; he made her ashamed by the youthful eagerness of his
attentions, which were painfully out of keeping with his premature old
age. To all these cajoleries, Marguerite herself presented the contrast
of actual distress, shown sometimes by a word of doubt, sometimes by a
glance along the empty shelves of the sideboards in the dining-room.

"Well, well," he said, following her eyes, "in six months we shall fill
them again with gold, and marvellous things. You shall be like a queen.
Bah! nature herself will belong to us, we shall rise above all created
beings--through you, you my Marguerite! Margarita," he said, smiling,
"thy name is a prophecy. 'Margarita' means a pearl. Sterne says so
somewhere. Did you ever read Sterne? Would you like to have a Sterne? it
would amuse you."

"A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease," she answered; "we have
suffered enough already."

"Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you shall
be rich and all-powerful."

"Mademoiselle has got such a good heart," said Lemulquinier, whose
seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.

For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all
the natural graces of his character and the charms of his conversation.
Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out a magnetic
fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness of spirit,
which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were, his daughters
into his heart. When Emmanuel de Solis came he found, for the first
time in many months, the father and the children reunited. The young
professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the influence of the
scene; for Claes's manners and conversation had recovered their former
irresistible seduction!

Men of science, plunged though they be in abysses of thought and
ceaselessly employed in studying the moral world, take notice,
nevertheless, of the smallest details of the sphere in which they live.
More out of date with their surroundings than really absent-minded, they
are never in harmony with the life about them; they know and forget
all; they prejudge t