Time fled so rapidly and to Lucile so pleasantly, too, that she had reached the very verge of her legal maturity before she once deigned to bestow a thought upon what change, if any, her eighteenth birthday would bring about. A few days preceding her accession to majority, a large package of letters from France, _via_ New York, arrived, directed to M. Marmont himself, and evidently written without a knowledge of his death. The bundle came to my care, and I hastened at once to deliver it, personally, to the blooming and really beautiful Lucile. I had not seen her for many months, and was surprised to find so great an improvement in her health and appearance. Her manners were more marked, her conversation more rapid and decided, and the general contour of her form far more womanly. It required only a moment's interview to convince me that she possessed unquestioned talent of a high order, and a spirit as imperious as a queen's. Those famous eyes of hers, that had, nearly two years before, attracted in such a remarkable manner the attention of Pollexfen, had not failed in the least; on the contrary, time had intensified their power, and given them a depth of meaning and a dazzling brilliancy that rendered them almost insufferably bright. It seemed to me that contact with the magnetic gaze of the photographer had lent them something of his own expression, and I confess that when my eye met hers fully and steadily, mine was always the first to droop. Knowing that she was in full correspondence with her lover, I asked after Courtland, and she finally told me all she knew. He was still suffering from the effect of the assassin's blow, and very recently had been attacked by inflammatory rheumatism. His health seemed permanently impaired, and Lucile wept bitterly as she spoke of the poverty in which they were both plunged, and which prevented him from essaying the only remedy that promised a radical cure. "Oh!" exclaimed she, "were it only in our power to visit _La belle France_, to bask in the sunshine of Dauphiny, to sport amid the lakes of the Alps, to repose beneath the elms of Chálons!" "Perhaps," said I, "the very letters now unopened in your hands may invite you back to the scenes of your childhood." "Alas! no," she rejoined, "I recognize the handwriting of my widowed aunt, and I tremble to break the seal." Rising shortly afterwards, I bade her a sorrowful farewell. Lucile sought her private apartment before she ventured to unseal the dispatches. Many of the letters were old, and had been floating between New York and Havre for more than a twelvemonth. One was of recent date, and that was the first one perused by the niece. Below is a free translation of its contents. It bore date at "Bordeaux, July 12, 1853," and ran thus: EVER DEAR AND BELOVED BROTHER: