Now, I cannot affect to say that all this was very reassuring. This poor simple child of the mountains showed a spirit as sordid and as calculating as though she were baptized in May Fair. It was a terrible shock to me to see this; a dire overthrow to a very fine edifice that I was just putting the roof on! “Would Kate Herbert have made me such a speech?” thought I. “Would she have declared herself so venal and so worldly?--and why not? May it not be, perhaps, simply that a mere question of good-breeding, the usages of a polite world, might have made all the difference, and that she would have felt what poor Catinka felt and owned to? If this were true, the advantages were all on the side of sincerity. With honesty as the basis, what may not one build up of character? Where there is candor there are at least no disappointments. This poor simple child, untutored in the wiles of a scheming world, where all is false, unreal, and deceptive, has the courage to say that her heart can be bought. She is ready in her innocence, too, to sell it, just as the Indians sell a great territory for a few glass beads or bright buttons. And why should not I make the acquisition in the very spirit of a new settler? It was I discovered this lone island of the sea; it was I first landed on this unknown shore; why not claim a sovereignty so cheaply established?” I put the question arithmetically before me: Given, a young girl, totally new to life and its seductions, deeply impressed with the value of wealth, to find the measure of venality in a well-brought-up young lady, educated at Clapham, and finished at Boulogne-sur-Mer. I expressed it thus: D-y=T+a?, or an unknown quantity. “What strange marks are you drawing there?” cried she, as I made these figures on the slate. “A caprice,” said I, in some confusion. “No,” said she; “I know better. It was a charm. Tell truth,--it was a charm.” “A charm, dearest; but for what?” “_I_ know,” said she, shaking her head and laughing, with a sort of wicked drollery. “_You_ know! Impossible, child.” “Yes,” she said with great gravity, while she swept her hand, across the slate and erased all the figures. “Yes _I_ know, and I 'll not permit it.” “But what, in Heaven's name, is trotting through your head, Catinka? You have not the vaguest idea of what those signs meant.” “Yes,” she said, even more solemnly than before. “I know it all. You mean to steal away my heart in spite of me, and you are going to do it with a charm.” “And what success shall I have, Catinka?” “Oh, do not ask me,” said she, in a tone of touching misery. “I feel it very sore here.” And she pressed her hand to her side. “Ah me,” sighed she, “if there were only pearls!” The ecstasy her first few words gave me was terribly routed by this vile conclusion, and I started abruptly, and in an angry voice, said, “Let us go on; Vaterchen will fear we are lost.” “And all this gold; what shall I do with it?” cried she.