s in the corps of La Fayette, during the recent revolutionary
struggle, with his brilliant, accomplished wife, were all unexpected and
distinguished additions to the circle.

Burr gently cleared the way for his fair companion, and, purposely
placing her where the full light of the wax chandeliers set off her
beauty to the best advantage, devoted himself to her with a subserviency
as deferential as if she had been a goddess.

For all that, he was not unobservant, when, a few moments after, Madame
de Frontignac was led in, on the arm of a Senator, with whom she was
presently in full flirtation.

He observed, with a quiet, furtive smile, that, while she rattled and
fanned herself, and listened with apparent attention to the flatteries
addressed to her, she darted every now and then a glance keen as a steel
blade towards him and his companion. He was perfectly adroit in playing
off one woman against another, and it struck him with a pleasant sense
of oddity, how perfectly unconscious his sweet and saintly neighbor was
of the position in which she was supposed to stand by her rival; and
poor Mary, all this while, in her simplicity, really thought that she
had seen traces of what she would have called the "strivings of the
spirit" in his soul. Alas! that a phrase weighed down with such
mysterious truth and meaning should ever come to fall on the ear as mere
empty cant!

With Mary it was a living form,--as were all her words; for in nothing
was the Puritan education more marked than in the earnest _reality_ and
truthfulness which it gave to language; and even now, as she stands by
his side, her large blue eye is occasionally fixed in dreamy reverie as
she thinks what a triumph of Divine grace it would be, if these inward
movings of her companion's mind _should_ lead him, as all the pious of
New England hoped, to follow in the footsteps of President Edwards, and
forms wishes that she could see him some time when she could talk to him
undisturbed.

She was too humble and too modest fully to accept the delicious flattery
which he had breathed, in implying that her hand had had power to unseal
the fountains of good in his soul; but still it thrilled through all the
sensitive strings of her nature a tremulous flutter of suggestion.

She had read instances of striking and wonderful conversions from words
dropped by children and women,--and suppose some such thing should
happen to her! and that this so charming and distinguishe