now, taught by the desire of constantly
pleasing the man she loved, she knew how to clothe herself admirably,
and without producing incongruity between her elegance and the defects
of her conformation. The bust, however, was defective in the shoulders
only, one of which was noticeably much larger than the other.

She looked out of the window into the court-yard, then towards the
garden, as if to make sure she was alone with Balthazar, and presently
said, in a gentle voice and with a look full of a Flemish woman's
submissiveness,--for between these two love had long since driven out
the pride of her Spanish nature:--

"Balthazar, are you so very busy? this is the thirty-third Sunday since
you have been to mass or vespers."

Claes did not answer; his wife bowed her head, clasped her hands,
and waited: she knew that his silence meant neither contempt nor
indifference, only a tyrannous preoccupation. Balthazar was one of those
beings who preserve deep in their souls and after long years all their
youthful delicacy of feeling; he would have thought it criminal to
wound by so much as a word a woman weighed down by the sense of physical
disfigurement. No man knew better than he that a look, a word, suffices
to blot out years of happiness, and is the more cruel because it
contrasts with the unfailing tenderness of the past: our nature leads us
to suffer more from one discord in our happiness than pleasure coming in
the midst of trouble can bring us joy.

Presently Balthazar appeared to waken; he looked quickly about him, and
said,--

"Vespers? Ah, yes! the children are at vespers."

He made a few steps forward, and looked into the garden, where
magnificent tulips were growing on all sides; then he suddenly stopped
short as if brought up against a wall, and cried out,--

"Why should they not combine within a given time?"

"Is he going mad?" thought the wife, much terrified.

To give greater interest to the present scene, which was called forth
by the situation of their affairs, it is absolutely necessary to glance
back at the past lives of Balthazar Claes and the granddaughter of the
Duke of Casa-Real.

Towards the year 1783, Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina de Nourho, then
twenty-two years of age, was what is called in France a fine man. He
came to finish his education in Paris, where he acquired excellent
manners in the society of Madame d'Egmont, Count Horn, the Prince
of Aremberg, the Spanish ambassador, Helvetiu