heart and cross, were on Sundays, the
admiration of the place; and a lad emancipated
from sabots, to work in the garden,
and help Nannie in the rougher occupations
of the house. He fell in love with her, I
remember, and he being some years her junior,
and she being rather a belle and virtuous
withal, she was moved, by all these united considerations,
to box his ears on his attempting
to demonstrate the state of his feelings by
trying to kiss her when, attired as above
recorded, her beauty shone forth too resplendent
for him to succeed in controlling his
youthful passion.

Before a year was out, the two children
had a doll to put in the baby-house, and to
play with from morning till night. They
nursed it alternately, and worshipped it, and
had moments of jealousy about it, and wondered
over it, and found it a miracle of genius
and intellect, when to stranger eyes it was
capable of nothing but sleeping and sucking
and stretching its toes before the fire.

When it should walk! O when it should
walk, and when it should speak its mother's
name!—When it did, the child-mother lay
in her grave in the Protestant cemetery at
La Rochelle, and the boy-father took it there
to strew flowers on the turf.

When I first awoke from the stunning
effect of the blow, I was like a ship that
struck full by a tremendous breaker, stands
for a moment paralysed and grieving, then
staggers blindly on, without rudder or compass,
both swept away in the general ruin.

The wild spirit within me, which the peaceful
and innocent happiness of the last two
years had soothed and stilled, broke forth
again, and my first impulse was to rush from
the scene of my lost felicity, and in a life of
reckless adventure seek to lose myself and
the recollection of all I had won, all I had
been bereft of in that short space.

Thank God, I had the child. That saved
me.

And now at twenty-one, when most men
have hardly made their first start in life, I,
a father and a widower, had passed the first
stages of my manhood's career, and was
about to gather up the shattered fragments
of my youth's hopes and prospects, and try
to patch them together to carry me through
the rest of it.

At first my father, now all affection and
sympathy, since the change my marriage had
brought, urged my returning with the child
to England. But this a strange feeling, partaking
perhaps more of jealousy than anything
else, made me decline doing. On
Mabel, "Ma-belle "as Suzanne used to call
her, half-believing that that was really the
translation of the name, had now concentrated
all the love and interest of my life. Here
she was all my own, I was all hers; nothing,
nobody, could lay any claim to the love, the
time or the attention of either, so as to distract
it from, the other. No one could exert
influence or authority over either to the
exclusion or prejudice, in however alight a
degree, of the other.

My child had no mother; no one else
therefore, however near or dear, should in
any degree supply her place but myself. I
would be all and everything to her, and if
she never missed her mother, it should be to
me alone she should owe it. A foolish
thought perhaps, perhaps a selfish one; yet
who shall say, seeing from what it doubtless
saved me?

Happily the child was healthy, sweet-tempered,
and really, all paternal illusions
apart, singularly beautiful and intelligent.
My baby, my little Queen Mab! I see her
now, as in her black frock and straw hat I
used to carry her forth at first in the still
warm evenings, when the glow and the glare
of the day had passed by, and the sea-breeze
stirred the roses in the garden.

With her I did not feel quite so frightfully
alone: her signs, her attempts at speech, her
little wilfulnesses, her caresses, her ceaseless
claims on my aid and attention, withdrew me
as nothing else could from constant brooding
over my loss. Later, when I could bear
it—I could not, for a long time—I used to
take her to the châtaigneraie, where I was
wont to watch for Suzanne, and sitting there
as of old, leave her to play on the grass beside
me, while with half-shut eyes, I gazed on the
glowing spot at the end of the green walk,
dreaming, dreaming, with a gnawing at my
heart, of the shadow that used to cross it, of
the footstep that used to come along that
shaded alley, of the pause with the hand on
the wicket. Then I remembered that now
not all the yearning and craving of my soul
could, as I fancied it did of old, bring her
one step nearer to me: and then my grief
and desolation would find vent in passionate
tears, and the child, who was too well used
to see me weep to be alarmed, as children
mostly are, would climb up on my breast,
and draw my hands from before my face, and
kiss and soothe me with her sweet baby
caresses.

It was a great though secret joy to me,
that though gentle and tractable to all, she
could be said to love no one but me. I think
the excellent pastor guessed the existence of
this feeling; for fond as he was of the child,
and strong and natural as were his claims to
her affection, he ever avoided to put them
conspicuously forward, or to attempt, in any
way to interfere with her management.
For this, even more than for his many other
proofs of regard and kindness, I was deeply
grateful. I encouraged the child to be familiar
with him. But though she showed deference
and duty, and even returned his caresses, I
could see with secret triumph that her heart
was not in her acts, and that as soon as she
thought she might without offence return to
me, she would glide from his knee, and stealing
to mine, nestle on my breast, content to