"The house," he said, "has never been inhabited since I came to live in this neighborhood, though that is now upward of forty years since. It belonged to a family of the name of Beaugency, and the last members of it who resided here were a father and daughter. Henriette de Beaugency she was called: a beautiful creature, I have been informed, and the idol of her father, whose affection she amply returned. They led a very retired life, and seldom quitted the place, except to pay an annual visit to the other side of the Pyrenees, where she had an elder brother married to a Spanish lady of considerable fortune; but Mademoiselle Henriette had two companions who seemed to make her amends for the absence of other society. One was a young girl called Rosina, who had been her foster-sister, and who now lived with her in the capacity of waiting-maid; the other was her cousin, Eugène de Beaugency, an orphan, and dependent on her father; his own having lost every thing he possessed, in consequence of some political offense previous to the Revolution. It was even reported that the Beaugency family had been nigh suffering the same fate, and that some heavy fines which had been extracted from them had straitened their means, and obliged them to live in retirement. However this might be, Henriette appeared perfectly contented with her lot. Eugène studied with her, and played with her; and they grew up together with all the affection and familiarity of a brother and sister; while old M. de Beaugency never seems to have suspected that any other sentiment could possibly subsist between them: not that they took the slightest pains to disguise their feelings; and it was their very openness that had probably lulled the father's suspicions. Indeed, their lives flowed so smoothly, and their intercourse was so unrestrained, that nothing ever occurred to awaken even themselves to the nature of their sentiments; while the affection that united them had grown so gradually under the parent's eyes, that their innocent terms of endearment, and playful caresses, appeared to him but the natural manifestations of the relation in which they stood to each other. The first sorrow Henriette had was when Eugène was sent to Paris to study for the bar; but it was a consolation that her own regret scarcely exceeded that of her father; and when she used to be counting the weeks and days as the period of his return drew nigh, the old man was almost as pleased as she was to see their number diminish.