In the pretty town of Macon, on the banks of the Saone, lived Leonie Regnault. She remembered no other home than the gray stone house with its balconied windows that overlooked the beautiful river and the long, somewhat formal promenades that stretch along its banks, with their green trees and many seats, but never a blade of grass--all dry, hard-beaten gravel, after the ugly French fashion, convenient enough, it must be confessed, for the evening loungers, gay or tired, whom the dewy green of Nature might incommode. Leonie's father lived in Paris, and he had brought her when only three years old to the gray stone house and the care of his only sister, Madame Perrin, a childless widow, who gladly received the beautiful little girl to the large shelter of a loving heart. But Leonie never forgot her father. The little creature would sit on her low-cushioned chair and sing to herself, "Mon beau papa! mon beau papa! O comme je t'aime, mon beau papa!" I suppose every tender father appears beautiful to his little child, but Colonel Regnault was indeed a strikingly handsome man, with a perfect grace and dignity of manner which rendered him indispensable to the court of Louis Napoleon, where he had a prominent position on all days of ceremony. Once or twice a year he made his escape from court duties for a brief visit to Leonie, whose love for him grew more intense with years, concentrating in itself all the romance of her enthusiastic nature. Madame Perrin saw few visitors, and scarcely ever went out except to mass. Every morning her good Louise took Leonie to the girls' school in the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Leonie had her inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so devoted to each other as were Leonie Regnault and Helene Dupres. They sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new--the merest nothing has its poem and history. They had made their first communion together, which was the most important incident hitherto in Leonie's uneventful life. Her father had come down on this occasion, and when she came from the altar he had put aside her white veil and kissed her with tears in his eyes.