c
pleasure in the beautiful light and heat, and cared not, though it
burned a soul away.

Burr was one of those men willing to play with any charming woman the
game of those navigators who give to simple natives glass beads and
feathers in return for gold and diamonds,--to accept from a woman her
heart's blood in return for such odds and ends and clippings as he can
afford her from the serious ambition of life.

Look in with us one moment, now that the party is over, and the busy
hum of voices and blaze of lights has died down to midnight silence and
darkness; we make you clairvoyant, and you may look through the walls of
this stately old mansion, still known as that where Rochambeau held his
head-quarters, into this room, where two wax candles are burning on a
toilette table, before an old-fashioned mirror. The slumberous folds
of the curtains are drawn with stately gloom around a high bed, where
Colonel de Frontignac has been for many hours quietly asleep; but
opposite, resting with one elbow on the toilette table, her long black
hair hanging down over her night-dress, and the brush lying listlessly
in her hand, sits Virginie, looking fixedly into the dreamy depths of
the mirror.

Scarcely twenty yet, all unwarned of the world of power and passion that
lay slumbering in her girl's heart, led in the meshes of custom and
society to utter vows and take responsibilities of whose nature she was
no more apprised than is a slumbering babe, and now at last fully awake,
feeling the whole power of that mysterious and awful force which we call
love, yet shuddering to call it by its name, but by its light beginning
to understand all she is capable of, and all that marriage should have
been to her! She struggles feebly and confusedly with her fate, still
clinging to the name of duty, and baptizing as friendship this strange
new feeling which makes her tremble through all her being. How can she
dream of danger in such a feeling, when it seems to her the awakening
of all that is highest and noblest within her? She remembers when she
thought of nothing beyond an opera-ticket or a new dress; and now she
feels that there might be to her a friend for whose sake she would try
to be noble and great and good,--for whom all self-denial, all high
endeavor, all difficult virtue would become possible,--who would be to
her life, inspiration, order, beauty.

She sees him as woman always sees the man she loves,--noble, great, and
good;--for