"I was always welcome at the Nid de l'Aigle. Old Cazot, with the instinct of servants who have lived with people of birth till they are as proud of their master's heraldry as though it were their own, discerned that I was of the same rank as her adored House of De l'Heris--if indeed she admitted any equal to them--and with all the cheery familiarity of a Frenchwoman treated me with punctilious deference, being as thoroughly imbued with respect and adoration for the aristocracy as any of those who died for the white lilies in the Place de la Révolution. And Florelle--Florelle watched for me, and counted her hours by those I spent with her. You are sure I had not read and played with women's hearts so long--women, too, with a thousand veils and evasions and artifices, of which she was in pure ignorance even of the existence--without having this heart, young, unworn, and unoccupied, under my power at once, plastic to mould as wax, ready to receive any impressions at my hands, and moulded easily to my will. Florelle had read no love stories to help her to translate this new life to which I awoke her, or to put her on her guard against it. I went there often, every day at last, teaching my pupil the art which she was only too glad and too eager to learn, stirring her vivid imagination with descriptions of that brilliant outside world, of whose pleasures, gayeties and pursuits she was as ignorant as any little gentian flower on the rocks; keeping her spell-bound with glimpses of its life, which looked to her like fairyland, bizarre bal masqué though it be to us; and pleasing myself with awakening new thoughts, new impressions, new emotions, which swept over her tell-tale face like the lights and shades over meadow-land as the sun fades on and off it. She was a new study, a new amusement to me, after the women of our world, and I beguiled my time with her, not thoughtlessly, as I might have done, not too hastily, as I _should_ have done ten years before, but pleased with my new amusement, and more charmed with Florelle than I at first knew, though I confess I soon wished to make her love me, and soon tried my best to make her do so--an easy task when one has had some practice in the rose-hued atmosphere of the boudoir, among the most difficile and the most brilliant coquettes of Europe! Florelle, with a nature singularly loving, and a mind singularly imaginative, with no rival for me even in her fancy, soon lavished on me all the love of which her impassioned and poetic character was capable. She did not know it, but I did. She loved me, poor child!--love more pure, unselfish, and fond than I ever won before, than I shall ever win again.