"I was sure of it. If I could only have seen her with my dear papa! He is so handsome always." "She was a great singer too." "I am glad of it. I shall be a singer when I have learned in Paris. I care more for the lessons in singing than for anything else in the great beautiful city, except being with my own papa." "But, Leonie, your mother sang in the Grand Opera. She was the best singer in France, or in the world perhaps, and everybody was crazy about her." "And so papa married an opera-singer? It is quite a romance." "He did not marry her." "Not marry her?" said Leonie with white face and great black, wide-open eyes. "She was married already to one of the singers in the opera, and she left him to live with your father." Leonie's white lips shaped rather than uttered the question, "What did he do, the husband?" "He challenged your father, and, though he was so much his inferior, Leon was too generous to hurt his feelings by refusing to fight with him after doing him such an injury. He was so good a swordsman that he easily disarmed him with only a slight wound." "This is terrible!" said Leonie. "My father such a wicked man!" "That is not the way the world looked at it. All the men envied Leon, and the women flattered and spoiled him more than ever." "I hate my father!" cried Leonie with quick, passionate sobs. "No wonder my poor mother died. I shall be her avenger: I feel it." "You do not know what you are saying. Your mother avenged herself. She deserted him as she deserted her husband, and you too, my poor child, when you were just learning to say 'Mamma.' Poor Leon! he sinned, but he suffered too. Be merciful to him, Leonie, as you pray God to be merciful to you." "Is my mother alive?" asked Leonie, shivering. "No: she died three years ago. Your father never would see her again, but when he heard that she was sick and in want (she had entirely lost her wonderful voice), he gave her an annuity because she was your mother. Father Aubrey used to see her from time to time, and he said she was truly penitent before she died." "Oh, what shall I do? I shall never be happy again--never, never! What made you tell me? How could you?" said poor Leonie, wringing her little hands and burying her face in the cushions. "My child, you would hear it sooner or later in that great, wicked city, and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid--" here the poor little woman broke down and began to cry like Leonie, but less violently--"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera, Leonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself." "I will die first," answered Leonie. "I wish I had never been born." "Don't tell your father, Leonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the conversation ended.