Charlotte's Inheritance — Book The Second Chapter 1 The Fate of Susan Lenoble

THE FATE OF SUSAN LENOBLE.

Seven years after that miserable summer night at Beaubocage on which Gustave Lenoble was disowned by his father, a man and woman, with a boy five years of age, were starving in a garret amongst the housetops and chimneys of Rouen.

In the busy city these people lived lonely as in a forest, and were securely hidden from the eyes of all who had ever known them.

The man--haggard, dying--cherished a pride that had grown fiercer as the grip of poverty tightened upon him.

The woman lived only for her husband and her child.

The man was Gustave Lenoble.

The world had gone ill with him since he cast his destiny into the lap of the woman he loved.

In all these years no olive-bearing dove had spanned the gulf that yawned between the prodigal and his father.

The seigneur of Beaubocage had been marble.

A

narrow-minded old man, living his narrow life, and nursing one idea with fanatical devotion, was of all men the least likely to forgive.

Vain had been the tears and entreaties of mother and sister.

The doors of that joyless dwelling on the fertile flats beyond Vevinord were sealed against the offender with a seal not to be broken, even had he come thither to plead for pardon, which he did not.

"My father would have sold me as negro slaves are sold _la-bas_," he said, on those rare occasions when he opened his old wounds, which were to the last unhealed: "I am glad that I escaped the contemptible barter."

He was in very truth glad.

Poverty and hardship seemed to him easier to bear than the dreary prosperity of Cotenoir and a wife he could not have loved.

The distinguishing qualities of this man's mind were courage and constancy.

There are such noble souls born into the world, some to shine with lustre supernal, many to burn and die in social depths, obscure as ocean's deepest cavern.

In his love for the woman he had chosen Gustave Lenoble never wavered.

He worked for her, he endured for her, he hoped against hope for her sake;

and it was only when bodily strength failed that this nameless foot-soldier began to droop and falter in life's bitter battle.

Things had gone ill with him.

He had tried his fate as an advocate in Paris, in Caen, in Rouen--but clients would not come.

He had been a clerk, now in one counting-house, now in another, and Susan and he had existed somehow during the seven years of their married life.

They clung to each other with affection that seemed to grow with every new sorrow; nor did love exhibit any inclination to spread his wings and take flight from the window, though poverty came in every day at the door, and sat by the hearth, a familiar companion and inevitable guest.

The mother and sister contrived to help this poor castaway with the veriest scrapings of a miserly household.

The old man, soured by his great disappointment, grew sordid and covetous with increasing years, and the lives of the women were hard and hopeless.

By little cheats, and petty contrivances, and pitiful falsifications of financial statements, they managed to scrape together a few louis now and then for the struggling exile; and to do this was the sole delight of their patient lives.

They contrived also to correspond secretly with Gustave, and were informed of the birth of his son.

"Ah, if thou couldst see how beautiful he is," wrote the father, "this child of pure and true love, thou wouldst no longer regret my breach of faith with Madelon Frehlter.

I knew not until now how like infant children are to angels.

I knew not how true to nature are the angels in the pictures of Raffaelle and Murillo.

Thou knowest the print of Murillo's Assumption; the picture is in the Louvre.

If thou canst remember that picture, dear mother, thou hast but to recall the face of one of the cherubim about the feet of our Lady, and thou hast the portrait of my boy.

He opens his eyes, and looks at me as I write.

Ah!

that he and I and my Susan were with thee in the little salon at Beaubocage--my sister, Susan, you, and I united round this darling's cradle.

He has been born in poverty, but his birth has made us very happy."

The sentiment of this letter was no spurious or transient feeling.

For this child Gustave Lenoble evinced an unchanging fondness.

It was indeed no part of his nature to change.

The little one was his comfort in affliction, his joy during every brief interval of prosperity.

When the battle was well nigh fought, and he began to feel himself beaten.

His chief anxieties, his ever-returning fears, were for his wife and child.

To Susan the thought of parting from him was a despair too deep for tears.

She would have been something less than woman if she had not loved her husband with more than common affection.

She watched the change that illness brought in the frank face, the stalwart figure; and little by little the awful truth came home to her.

The hour was at hand in which she must lose him.

"If you could have rest, Gustave, better medical advice, more comforts, you would soon be strong again.

I am sure your father would not refuse to forgive you now.

Write to him, dearest.

Go back to Beaubocage, and let your mother and sister nurse you.

I will stay here with the little one.

It shall be forgotten that you have a wife and child."

"No, dear one; I will not desert you, even for a day, to buy back my father's love.

I would rather be here with you than in the pleasantest home without you.

But we must face the future, Susan; we must be brave and wise, for the little one's sake.

You are not so strong that you can afford to trust blindly in your power to protect him by-and-by.

I have written a letter to my father.

He has proved himself a hard man to me, cruel and obdurate beyond all my fears; but I know he is not altogether heartless.

When I am dead, you will take the letter in one hand, the child in the other, and go to Beaubocage.

I believe he will adopt the boy, and that the little one will give him the comfort and happiness he hoped from me.

He must be very lonely; and I cannot doubt that his heart will melt when he sees the child's face, and hears that he has no longer a son.

As for yourself, my poor girl, I see for you no hope except in the old Yorkshire home, and the friends you fear to see again."

"I no longer fear them," said his wife, with unwonted energy, "I could not go to them seven years ago; but I can go to them as your wife."

"Ah, thank God, the poor name is worth something for you."

"Yes, dear; and I will go back to them--to-morrow."

"To-morrow!"

"To-morrow, Gustave.

I have been selfish and cruel to delay so long.

The old dread of seeing my sister's reproachful face has been strong enough to hold me back, when a little courage might have enabled me to help you.

The burden has been all on you, and I have done nothing.

O, what a wretch I must have been to sit idly by and see you suffer, and make no effort to help you!"

"But, my darling, you have not been idle.

You have been the dearest and most industrious of wives, and have helped me to bear my burden.

You have done more, dear--you have made my burden pleasant to me."

"I will try to lighten it, Gustave," cried Susan, with excitement.

"O, why, why did I never try before!

My sister and her husband are well off--rich perhaps.

If they are still living, if no cruel changes have come to pass at Newhall, they could help us with a little money.

They might even give us a home.

I will start for England to-morrow."

"Nay, my dear, you are not strong enough to travel so far alone.

It seems, indeed, a happy thought this of your rich relations; but you must not undertake such a journey.

You might write."

"No, Gustave, I will trust to no letter; I will go.

It will be no pain for me to humble myself for your sake.

I will go straight to my sister.

I

know what a tender compassionate heart it is that I shall appeal to."

There was much discussion; but Susan was resolute.

To scrape together the money for the journey she made efforts that were heroic in a nature so weak as hers.

She went to the Monte de Piete with the last of her little treasures, that one dear trinket to which she had clung even when hunger was at the door--the gimmal or alliance ring that Gustave had placed upon her finger before God's altar--the double symbolic circlet which bore on one side her name, on the other her husband's. This dearest of all her possessions she surrendered for a few francs, to make up the sum needful for her journey.

What it cost her to do this, what it cost her to tear herself away from her sick husband and her only child, who shall say?

There are pangs that cannot be counted, agonies that will come within no calculation--the infinite of pain.

She went.

Two kind souls, a labourer and his wife, lodgers in the same garret-story, promised to care for and help the invalid and child.

There is no desolation in which a child will not find a friend.

The journey was long and fatiguing; the anguish of her poor aching heart almost too much for endurance--a heart so heavy that even hope could scarce flutter it.

It was dull damp weather, though in the middle of summer.

The solitary traveller caught cold on the journey, and arrived in London in a high fever.

Ill, faint, and helpless, the great city seemed to her unspeakably dismal--most stony of all stony-hearted mothers to this wretched orphan.

She could go no farther than the darksome city inn where the coach from Southampton brought her.

She had come _via_ Havre.

Here she sank prostrate, and had barely sufficient strength to write an incoherent letter to her sister, Mrs. Halliday, of Newhall Farm, near Huxter's Cross, Yorkshire.

The sister came as fast as the fastest coach on the great northern road could carry her.

There was infinite joy in that honest sisterly heart over this one sinner's repentance.

Fourteen years had gone by since the young city-bred beauty had fled with that falsest of men, and most hardened of profligates, Montague Kingdon; and tidings from Susan were unlooked for and thrilling as a message from the grave.

Alas for the adverse fate of Susan Meynell!

The false step of her youth had set her for ever wrong upon life's highway.

When kind Mrs. Halliday came, Gustave Lenoble's wife was past her help; wandering in her mind; a girl again, but newly run away from her peaceful home; and with no thought save of remorse for her misdeeds.

The seven years of her married life seemed to have faded out of her mind.

She raved of Montague Kingdon's baseness, of her own folly, her vain regret, her yearning for pardon; but of the dying husband in the garret at Rouen she uttered no word.

And so, with her weary head upon her sister's breast, she passed away, her story untold, no wedding-ring on her wasted finger to bear witness that she died an honest man's wife; no letters or papers in her poor little trunk to throw light on the fourteen years in which she had been a castaway.

Mrs. Halliday stayed in London to see the wanderer laid in the quiet city churchyard where her family rested, and where for her was chosen an obscure corner in which she might repose forgotten and unknown.

But not quite nameless.

Mrs. Halliday could not leave the grave unmarked by any record of the sister she had loved.

The stone above the grave of Gustave's wife bore her maiden name, and the comforting familiar text about the one sinner who repenteth.

CHAPTER II. FORGIVEN TOO LATE.

For a week of long days and longer nights there was no step sounded on the stair, no opening or shutting of a door in the old dilapidated house where he lay languishing on the brink of an open grave, that did not move Gustave Lenoble with a sudden emotion of hope.

But the footsteps came and went, the doors were opened and shut again and again, and the traveller so waited, so hoped for did not return.

The boy--the brave bright son, who seemed to inherit all that was noblest and best in his father's nature--pined for his mother.

The man endured a martyrdom worse than the agony of Damiens, the slow tortures of La Barre.

What had befallen her?

That she could desert him or his child was a possibility that never shaped itself in his mind.

_That_ drop of poison was happily wanting in his cup; and the bitterness of death was sweet compared to the scorpion-sting of such a supposition.

She did not return.

Calamity in some shape had overtaken her--calamity dire as death; for, with life and reason, she could not have failed to send some token, some tidings, to those she loved.

The sick man waited a week after the day on which he had begun to expect her return.

At the end of that time he rose, with death in his face, and went out to look for her--to look for her in Rouen; for her whom the instinct of his heart told him was far away from that city--as far as death from life.

He went to the Cour de Messageries, and loitered and waited amidst the bustle of arriving and departing diligences, with a half-imbecile hope that she would alight from one of them.

The travellers came and went, pushing and hustling him in their selfish haste.

When night came he went back to his garret.

All was quiet.

The boy slept with the children of his good neighbour, and was comforted by the warmth of that strange hearth.

Gustave lit his candle, a last remaining morsel.

"You will last my time, friend," he said, with a wan smile.

He seated himself at the little table, pushed aside the medicine-bottles, searched for a stray sheet of letter-paper, and then began to write.

He wrote to his mother, telling her that death was at hand, and that the time had come in which she must succour her son's orphan child.

With this he enclosed a letter to his father--that letter of which he had spoken to his wife, and which had been written in the early days of his illness.

This packet he directed to Madame Lenoble, at Beaubocage.

There was no longer need for secrecy.

"When those letters are delivered I shall be past blame, and past forgiveness," he thought.

In the morning he was dead.

The neighbours posted the letter.

The neighbours comforted and protected the child for two days; and then there came a lady, very sad, very quiet, who wept bitterly in the stillness of that attic chamber where Gustave Lenoble lay; and who afterwards, with a gentle calmness of manner that was very sweet to see, made all necessary arrangements for a humble, but not a mean or ignominious, funeral.

"He was my brother," she said to the good friends of the neighbouring garret.

"We did our best to help him, my mother and I; but we little thought how bitterly he wanted help.

The brave heart would not suffer us to know that."

And then she thanked them with much tenderness for their charity to the dead man; and with these good people she went on foot through the narrow streets of the city to see her brother laid in his grave.

Until this was done the mournful lady, who was not yet thirty years of age, and of a placid nun-like beauty, abandoned herself to no transport of love for her orphan nephew; but when that last office of affection had been performed, she took the little one on her knees, and folded him to her breast, and gave him her heart, as she had given it long ago to his father; for this gentle unselfish creature was one who must needs have some shrine at which to offer her daily sacrifice of self.

Already she was beginning to think how the orphan was to be cared for and the widow also, for whose return she looked daily.

For the return of Susan Lenoble Cydalise waited at Rouen several days after the funeral.

She had, happily, an old school-fellow comfortably established in the city; and in the house of this old friend she found a home.

No one but her mother and this friend, whom she could trust, knew of the business that had brought her from Beaubocage.

In seven years the father had never uttered his only son's name; in all the seven years that name had never been spoken in his hearing.

When three weeks had gone by since the departure of Susan for England, all hope of her return was abandoned by Mademoiselle Lenoble and the neighbours who had known the absent woman.

"She had the stamp of death on her face when she went away," said the labourer's wife, "as surely as it was on him that she left.

I told her she had no strength for the journey; but she would go: there was no moving her from that.

She had rich friends _la-bas_, who might help her husband.

It was for that she went.

That thought seemed to give her a kind of fever, and the strength of fever."

"And there has come no letter--nothing?"

"Nothing, mademoiselle."

On this Cydalise determined to return to Beaubocage.

She could not well leave the child longer on the hands of these friendly people, even by paying for his maintenance, which she insisted on doing, though they would fain have shared their humble _pot-a-feu_ and coarse loaf with him unrecompensed.

She determined on a desperate step.

She would take her brother's orphan child back with her, and leave the rest to Providence--to the chance of some sudden awakening of natural affection in a heart that had long languished in a kind of torpor that was almost death.

The little fellow pined sadly for those dear familiar faces, those tender soothing voices, that had vanished so suddenly from his life.

But the voice of his aunt was very sweet and tender, and had a tone that recalled the father who was gone.

With this kind aunt he left Rouen in the lumbering old vehicle that plied daily betwixt that city and Vevinord.

"Thou canst call me Cydalise for a while, my little one," she said to him; for she did not wish the child to proclaim the relationship between them yet awhile.

Ah, what bitter tears the two women shed over the soft fair curls of that little head, when they had the boy all to themselves in the turret chamber at Beaubocage, on whose white walls the eyes of Cydalise had opened almost every morning of her pure eventless life!

"Why dost thou cry so, madame?"

the child asked of his grandmother, as she held him in her arms, kissing and weeping over him; "and what have they done with my father--and mamma too?

She went away one day, but she told me that she would come back, so quickly, ah, so quickly!

and the days passed, and they shut papa in his room, and would not let me go to him; and mamma did not come, though I asked the Blessed Virgin to send her back to me."

"Dear child, thy father and mother are in a brighter place than this hard world, where they had so much sorrow," Madame Lenoble answered, gently.

"Yes, they were often sorry," murmured the boy thoughtfully.

"It was because of money; but then, when there was no money, mamma cried and kissed me, and kissed papa, and the good papa kissed us both, and somehow it always ended in happiness."

Francois Lenoble was, happily, absent on this day of tribulation.

The women took their fill of sorrow, but it was sorrow mingled with a strange bitter sweetness that was almost joy.

The seigneur of Beaubocage had gone to dine, as he still often did, with his old friend Baron Frehlter; for the breach of faith which had caused a lifelong disunion of father and son had not divided the two proprietors.

Nay, indeed the Baron had been generous enough to plead the cause of the castaway.

"A man cannot dispose at will of his affections, my friend," he urged;

"and it was more generous in your son to break faith with my daughter before marriage than after."

Mademoiselle Frehlter had not broken her heart on account of her lover's falsehood.

She had been sufficiently indignant on the occasion, and had been more impatient of her mother's pet priest and pet poodle during the brief period in which she wore the willow.

She had recovered her good humour, however, on being wooed by a young subaltern in a cavalry regiment stationed at Vevinord, the offshoot of a grander house than that of Lenoble, and whose good looks and good lineage had ultimately prevailed with the Baron.

That gentleman had by no means too good an opinion of the son-in-law thus forced upon him; but peace was the highest good (with unlimited tobacco) to which his Germanic soul aspired; and for the sake of peace in the present he was content to hazard his daughter's happiness in the future.

"_That_ is very brilliant," he said of M. Paul de Nerague, the young lieutenant of light cavalry; "but it is not solid, like Gustave.

Your son is honest, candid--a brave heart.

It is for that I would have given him Madelon.

But it is Providence which disposes of us, as our good father St. Velours tells us often; and one must be content.

Young Nerague pleases my daughter, and I must swallow him, though for me he smells too strong of the barracks: _ca flaire la caserne, mon ami_."

That odour of the barracks which distinguished the sub-lieutenant Paul de Nerague became more odious after his marriage with the virtuous Madelon, when he was established--_niche_, as he himself called it--in very comfortable, though somewhat gruesome, apartments at Cotenoir.

His riotous deportment, his hospitable disposition (as displayed in the frequent entertainment of his brothers-in-arms at the expense of his father-in-law), his Don Juan-like demeanour in relation to the housemaids and kitchen-wenches of the chateau--innocent enough in the main, but on that account so much the more audacious--struck terror to the hearts of Madame Frehlter and her daughter; and the elder lady was much gratified by that thirst for foreign territory which carried the greater part of the French army and the regiment of the vivacious Paul to the distant wilds of Algeria.

The virtuous Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband.

But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant de Nerague.

The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise returned from Rouen with her brother's child.

The little boy was sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his aunt's bed (it had been his father's cot thirty years ago) when Francois Lenoble returned from Cotenoir that night.

It was not till the next day that he saw the child.

He had been making his usual morning's round in the gardens and orchards, when he came into the salon, and saw the little boy seated near his grandmother's chair, playing with some dominoes.

Something--perhaps the likeness to his dead son--the boy's black clothes, for Cydalise had contrived to dress him in decent mourning--struck suddenly on the old man's heart.

"Who is that boy?"

he asked, with a strange earnestness.

"Your son Gustave's only child," answered his wife gently,--"his orphan child."

Francois Lenoble looked at her, and from her to the boy; tried to speak, but could not; beckoned the child, and then dropped heavily into a chair and sobbed aloud.

Until this moment no one had ever seen him shed a tear for the son he had put away from his home--and, as it had seemed, from his heart.

Not by one sigh, not by one mournful utterance of the familiar name, had he betrayed the depth of that wound which he had endured, silently, obstinately, in all these years.

They suffered him to bemoan his dead son unhindered by stereotyped consolations.

The two women stood by, and pitied him in silence.

The little boy stared wonderingly, and at last crept up to the sorrow-stricken father.

"Why do you cry, poor old man?"

he asked.

"You have not lost your papa and mamma, as I have lost mine, have you?

I want to stay with you and be your little boy, please.

She told me to say that," he added, pointing to Cydalise.

--"And I have said it right, haven't I?"

he asked of the same lady.

--"I think I shall love you, because you are like my papa, only older and uglier," the little one concluded, with angelic candour.

The seigneur of Beaubocage dried his tears with an effort.

Beaubocage--Cotenoir.

Ah, me!

what empty sounds those two once magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire!

He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly.

His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son--the son whom he had disowned--whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey bristles on his rugged chin.

"My child," he murmured softly, "the fear is that I shall love thee too well, and be to thee as much too weakly indulgent as I was wickedly stern to thy father.

Anything is easier to humanity than justice."

This was said to himself rather than to the boy.

"Tell me thy name, little one," he asked presently, after a few moments' pensive meditation.

"I have two names, monsieur."

"Thou must call me grandfather.

And the two names?"

"Francois Gustave."

"I shall call thee Gustave."

"But papa always called me Francois, and mamma said it was the name of a cruel man; but papa said he loved the name--" "Ah, no more, little one!"

cried the lord of Beaubocage suddenly;

"thou knowest not with what dagger-thrusts thou dost pierce this poor old heart."

CHAPTER III. GUSTAVE THE SECOND.

The little Gustave grew and flourished.

Such love was lavished on him as rarely falls to the lot of children, though the spring of many lives may be rich in love's pure white blossom.

The existence of this child seemed all happiness.

He brought hope, and a sense of atonement, and all sweet things, to the quiet family at Beaubocage; and as he grew from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, it seemed to that household as if the first Gustave of their love had never been taken from them.

That Orphic fable of Zagreus repeats itself in many households.

For the one bright creature lost another is given; and then comes a time when it is almost difficult to separate the image of the missing one from the dear substitute who so nearly fills his place.

Francois Lenoble and his wife enjoyed a green old age, and the affection of their grandson made the cup of life sweet for them to the very dregs.

There are, happily, some natures which indulgence cannot injure; some luxuriant flowers which attain strength as well as beauty under the influence of these tropical heats of affection.

Gustave the second possessed all the noble qualities of Gustave the first.

Frank, generous, brave, constant, affectionate, light-hearted, he shone on the failing eyes of his kindred radiant as a young Apollo, brave as a mortal Hercules.

Those things which the ignorant heart has at some time so passionately desired are apt to be granted when the desire has grown somewhat cold and dead.

Thus it was with the ambition of Francois Lenoble.

He lived to see the lands of Cotenoir and Beaubocage united in the person of his grandson, who married Clarice, the only surviving child of M. and Madame de Nerague.

Two sons and a daughter had been born at Cotenoir; but the sons withered and faded in early boyhood, and even the daughter, though considered a flourishing plant in that poor garden of weakling blossoms, was but a fragile creature.

The old people at Beaubocage survived the seigneur and chatelaine of Cotenoir by some years, and survived also the fiery lieutenant, who fell in Algeria without having attained his captaincy, or added any military renown to the good old name of de Nerague in his own magnificent person.

Francois saw his grandson established at Cotenoir before he died.

He expired with his hand in that of Gustave, whom, in the half-consciousness of that last hour, he mistook for the son he had disowned.

"What door was that that shut?"

he asked, in an eager whisper.

"Who said I turned my son out of doors--my only son?

It's false!

I couldn't have done it!

Hark!

there's the door shutting again!

It sounds like the door of a tomb."

After this he dozed a little, and woke with a smile on his face.

"I have been dreaming of thy father, Gustave," he said calmly.

"I thought that I saw him with a light shining in his face, and that he kissed and forgave me."

This was the end.

The faithful wife was not slow to follow her husband to the grave, and there was now only a placid maiden lady at Beaubocage, Mademoiselle Cydalise Lenoble, whom everyone within ten leagues of Vevinord knew and loved,--a lay abbess, a Sister of Mercy in all save the robes; a tender creature, who lived only to do good.

Ten years passed, and M. Lenoble of Cotenoir was a widower with two fair young daughters at a convent school on the outskirts of Vevinord, and a boisterous son at an academy in Rouen.

Gustave had never followed any profession; the lands of Beaubocage secured him a competence, so prudently had the small estate been managed by the kindred who adored him.

His marriage had given him fortune.

He had no need of trade or profession.

His life was laid out for him like a prim Dutch flower-garden.

He was to live at Cotenoir, and look after his estate, and smoke his pipe, as Baron Frehlter had done, and be a good husband to his wife, a kind father to his children.

This latter part of his duty came natural to M. Lenoble.

It was not in him to be otherwise than kind to women and children.

His invalid wife praised him as a model of marital perfection.

It was Gustave who wheeled her sofa from one room to another, Gustave who prepared her medicines, Gustave whose careful hands adjusted curtains and _portieres_.

The poor woman lived and died believing herself the happiest of wives.

She mistook kindness for love.

M.

Lenoble bore his wife's demise with Christian calmness.

He was sorry that the fragile creature should have been taken so early from the pleasant home that was hers by right, but of passionate grief, or dreary sense of irreparable loss, there was none in that manly heart.

There were times when the widower reproached himself for this want of feeling; but in very truth Madame Lenoble, _jeune_, had lived and died a nonentity.

Her departure left no empty place; even her children scarcely missed her.

The father was all-in-all.

Gustave had married at twenty years of age.

He was twenty-nine when his wife died.

His eldest daughter, Clarice, eight; his second, Madelon, seven; the boy, a spoilt young dog of five, not yet despatched to the great school at Rouen.

But in '65 Mademoiselle Clarice was fifteen years of age, and a very charming performer on the pianoforte, as the good nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at Vevinord, told the father.

Mademoiselle Madelon was looking forward to her fourteenth anniversary, and she, too, was a very pretty pianist, and altogether a young prodigy of learning and goodness, as the nuns told the master of Cotenoir.

The demoiselles of Cotenoir stood high in the estimation of pupils and mistress; they were a kind of noblesse; and the simple-minded superioress spoke of these young persons with some pride when she described her establishment to a stranger.

It was a very comfortable little colony, a small world enclosed by high walls.

The good mothers who taught and cherished the children were for the greater part ladies of superior and even exalted station; and there was a gentleness, a tenderness, in their care for these young lambs not always to be insured by the payment of an annual stipend.

It must be confessed that the young lambs were apt to be troublesome, and required a good deal of watching.

To the eye of the philosopher that convent school would have afforded scope for curious study; for it is singular to discover what exceptional vices the youthful mind can develop from its inner consciousness, in homes as pure as this.

There were black sheep even in the convent of the Sacre Coeur, damsels marked with a sign that meant "dangerous."

Happily for Gustave Lenoble, his daughters were amongst the brightest and the purest of those girl-graduates.