it was only after learning to write that what she read began to
take a definite meaning for her. The fairy-tales perused but half
intelligently before were re-read with a new delight. She learnt grammar
with Deschartres, and from her grandmother took her first lessons in
music, an art of which she became passionately fond; and it always
remained for her a favourite source of enjoyment, though she never
acquired much proficiency as a musical performer. The educational
doctrines of Rousseau had then brought into fashion a _regime_ of
open-air exercise and freedom for the young, such as we commonly
associate with English, rather than French, child-life; and Aurore's
early years--when domestic hostilities and nursery tyrannies, from
which, like most sensitive children, she suffered inordinately, were
suspended--were passed in the careless, healthy fashion approved in this
country. A girl of her own age, but of lower degree, was taken into the
house to share her studies and pastimes. Little Ursule was to become, in
later years, the faithful servant of her present companion, who had then
become lady of the manor, and who never lost sight of this humble
friend. Aurore had also a boy playmate in a _protege_ of her
grandmother's, five years her senior, who patronised and persecuted her
by turns, in his true fraternal fashion. This boy, Hippolyte, the son of
a woman of low station, was in fact Aurore's half-brother, adopted from
his birth and brought up by Madame Dupin the elder, whose indulgence,
where her son was concerned, was infinite. With these, and the children
of the farm-tenants and rural proprietors around, Aurore did not want
for companions. But the moment soon arrived when the painful family
dispute of which she was the object, was to become the cause of more
distress to the child than to her elders. There were reasons which stood
in the way of Madame Maurice Dupin's fixing her residence permanently
under her mother-in-law's roof. But the mind of the latter was set on
obtaining the guardianship of her grand-daughter, the natural heir to
her property, and on thus assuring to her social and educational
privileges of a superior order. The child's heart declared unreservedly
for her mother, whose passionate fondness she returned with the added
tenderness of a deeper nature, and all attempts to estrange the two had
only drawn them closer together. But the pecuniary resources of Maurice
Dupin's widow were of the smallest, an