mistress. It was idolatry. It was an infinite
devotion without name or term: the full perfection
of that childlike effusion which comes
but once in life, for the first friend, the first
lover; and is never equalled again, even for
husband or for child.

M. le Comte Dupuy was an elderly man
without moral perceptions; excepting one;
the respect due to a demoiselle. Marie
Maconnell was young, pretty, motherless,
and confided to him; and M. Dupuy looked
on her as a kind of religious deposit, which,
if he lost, would leave him an uncomfortable
time in purgatory. He was therefore very
strict with her, both as regarded himself and
every one else. He might have been the
Saint Père of Rome or a Carthusian Monk,
for anything bordering on levity of speech or
conduct to Marie, although he was known as
a man with no more real virtue than Tartuffe.
He might have been a gaoler of the
Inquisition, and she its pet heretic, for any
undue liberty allowed to her. Marie must
have been clever indeed to have escaped the
Count's care. He nailed down the jalousie
blinds of her window so that she could not
raise them; he locked the doors of the suite
of rooms whenever he went out, and took the
key with him, not trusting even the concierge.
Her bedroom door was locked every night,
and the key laid on Madame Dupuy's table;
and she was never suffered to go even into
the garden alone. Marie thought he was
very harsh, and complained of him to his
wife; but Madame Dupuy said he had
reason, and Marie must submit. Marie did
so, grumblingly. But M. Dupuy was harsh;
and uncertain, too. Sometimes Marie was a
crow, a cow, a stick, a stupid; and then she
was his dear little friend, his child, his little
love of a saint; and, once or twice—but not
often—his little cabbage, and his rabbit.
Whereat Marie used to wonder, and ask;
Madame Dupuy why the Count was first so
cross, and then so kind.

Madame Dupuy—a woman who never
deceived herself by imagination, and never
lost the clue to a truth by over indulgent
interpretation—was a keen observer. She
believed in virtue as little as in her
husband. She saw clearly enough the riddle
Marie could not explain, and read every
letter of it as if it had been the nursery hornbook.
But she was not jealous. At least
not yet. Marie was useful to her for another
year; then, she should require a more advanced
governess for her eldest girl; at
present, jealousy would have been a folly:
—and Madame Dupuy committed more sins
than follies. She told Marie it was M. le
Comte's way, and asked her if he did not
treat her, his wife, even more unkindly?
Which was true enough; for they led a most
unhappy life, and quarrelled twelve hours
out of the twenty-four.

While these two volcanoes slumbered
beneath Marie's tread, her father died, and
Emilie went down to Marseilles with Madame
de Lamotte. Marie was then thrown entirely
into the power of the Dupuys; who gradually
assumed a control over her, scarcely inferior
to her father's in harshness. Madame
Dupuy changed the most. She became cold
and severe, and scolded incessantly. If
Marie worked, the stitches were called "cat's
eyes," and must be undone; if she read, it
was idleness—why could she not do something
useful? If she went into the garden, it was
an assignation; and if she sat in her own
room, she was sullen, or perhaps writing a
love-letter: although, as Marie said, lovers do
not spring up like mushrooms, and there was
no one at the chateau, or, excepting M. le Curé,
for miles round. But it was Madame Dupuy's
intention to be unreasonable. In truth, she
was tired of Marie's wild, and somewhat
tactless devotion, and she had gradually become
jealous of her husband's evident love
for her; although she knew that Marie neither
returned nor suspected it. Marie tried not
to see this change. She called herself hard
names for even fancying that Madame Dupuy
could be unjust, and said to the Curé that
she was the most ungrateful creature under
heaven. But the Curé, who had keen eyes
too, told her that she ought to be more
measured in her self-accusations, and that
people must be just to themselves as well
as to others. Advice which Marie thought
not very good nor very true; being still
too blinded to understand the real value
of the marshlight glare that had bewildered
her.

At the chateau where they lived in the
country was a certain avenue on one side of
the house; at the end whereof was an arbour
hidden deep among the trees. This was
Marie's favourite hiding-place; for, since
Madame Dupuy had been so changed to her,
much of her old savage love of loneliness,
and many of her old wild, reckless ways, had
come back. No threats and no coercion
could keep her always in the house, now that
her patrons were so trebly strict. One day
she had been hidden in this arbour for a long
time, when M. Dupuy and his little daughter
Louise came in. It was a beautiful summer
day, still and breathless, and the cool shade
of the alley and the arbour made a very Eden
under the glowing sky. Marie—her eyes
fixed on the earth, and her raven hair
flung from her face—sat lost in a state of
dreamy feeling rather than of thought: a
vague half painful sentiment of something
wanting, mingled with a delicious
consciousness of happiness in youth, and
beauty, and life, and hope. A slate of
feeling not unusual to girlhood; especially
girlhood in the country.

M. Dupuy sat down by Marie. Louise
seated herself on a stone by the entrance. A
book was in her hand, and she appeared to
read it.

"I have forbidden you to sit here alone,