“Madam, this is beautifully written,” said an old nurse, looking up with the familiarity of an ancient and privileged servant. The person thus addressed was a young woman, clothed in black, so small and so frail, that at first sight, without doubt, one would have taken her for a child. She was seated before a table of dark wood, drawn up in front of a good fire, upon which burned two wax candles, shining upon a heap of loose leaves, one of which she had just finished writing, and was then reading. Laughing at the admiration of her nurse, she asked, “And do you, then, find it so beautiful?” “Do I find it beautiful?” replied Marianne; “never since the world began have I read any thing so affecting. What an interesting creature that Claire was! and what a pity that she died! Ah, her death grieved me much; one might say that it frightened me; but that would not be astonishing in such a great lonely room as this. I hate these great rooms, I do;” added the nurse, looking cautiously around her, and gazing with a look of affright at the window the most distant from where she and her mistress were sitting. “Oh how the curtain moves! did you not leave the shutters badly closed, madam?” “It was not I who shut them,” tranquilly replied Madam Cottin, for it was of her old Marianne asked the question. “Not you?” cried Marianne, in a frightened voice. “Who then could have shut them?” “You, most probably, Marianne.” “Me! I tell you, madam, I swear to you, as true as I am a good and sincere Christian, I swear to you, upon my soul—” “Do not swear at all, Marianne; there is no one here but we two; if it were not me, it could have been no one else but you, and it was not me—” “I am not a fool, out of my senses!” replied the Bordelaise. “I believe, rather,” she added in a solemn tone, “that there is some mystery behind the curtain—” “We will admit that it was I who closed the shutters,” interrupted Madam Cottin, impatiently again taking up the papers, and reading them. “But was it _really_ you?” importuned the nurse. “Why do you wish me to tell a lie? Shall I read you another page of my romance?” “Oh yes, I love to hear you read,” replied the old woman. “But what are you going to do with that romance, as you call it?” “Ah, Marianne, if I dared, if I did not fear the ridicule attached to the name of a female author, I would have it published, and the money that it would bring would ameliorate our condition. I would buy some articles of furniture—a piano, for instance—lonely and sad as I now am, music would charm my retreat.”