her nothing of the world from which she was shut out, and encouraged all that was self-devoted, visionary, and fervid in her nature, leaving her at seventeen as unconscious of evil as the youngest child. I despair of making you imagine what Florelle then was. Had I never met her, I should have believed in her as little as yourself, and would have discredited the existence of so poetic a creation out of the world of fiction; her ethereal delicacy, her sunny gayety when anything amused her, her intense sensitiveness, pained in a moment by a harsh word, pleased as soon by a kind one, her innocence of all the blots and cruelties, artifices and evils, of that world beyond her Nid de l'Aigle, made a character strangely new to me, and strangely winning, but which to you I despair of portraying: I could not have _imagined_ it. Had I never seen her, and had I met with it in the pages of a novel, I should have put it aside as a graceful but impossible conception of romance. "I went up that day to the Nid de l'Aigle, and Florelle received me with pleasure; perhaps Madame Cazot had instilled into her some scepticism that 'a grand seigneur,' as the woman was pleased to term me, would trouble himself to ride up the mountains from Luz merely to repeat his thanks for an hour's shelter and a supper of roasted chestnuts. She was a simple-minded, good-hearted old woman, who had lived all her life among the rocks and rivers of the Hautes-Pyrenées, her longest excursion a market-day to Luz or Bagnères. She looked on her young mistress and charge as a child--in truth, Florelle was but little more--and thought my visit paid simply from gratitude and courtesy, never dreaming of attributing it to 'cette beauté héréditaire des L'Heris,' which she was proud of boasting was an inalienable heirloom to the family.