"What's the matter with Leonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a welcome. What ails the child?" "She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels sad at leaving Helene and me," replied his sister. "She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel. The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and mobile as Leonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire. Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and direful headache _in terrorem_; and the colonel thought he was polite to me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and which heightened the beauty of Leonie, extinguished the delicate color and soft blue eyes of Madame Regnault, and were so little in harmony with her person and character as to have almost the effect of a discord in music. A year passed, and her heart was made glad by a dear little son, who was named Leon for his father. The little fellow was six weeks old, and his mother had scarcely left the nursery, which was a bit of heaven to her, when Colonel Regnault startled her from her dream of bliss: "I have found just the nurse for the baby, the wife of a small farmer who lives close to Rosny Station. She will wean her child and take him. She is such a fresh, healthy-looking woman, and everything is so clean and tidy in her cottage, that you will be delighted with her, I am sure." "Oh, Leon, may I not nurse him myself? I cannot give him up to anybody. Who will take so good care of my little precious darling as his own mother?"