The young girl smoothed her forehead with her hand as if to drive away the shadow lurking there, and, leaning over the balustrade, threw a kiss to the gentlemen below. Then, turning to Mme. Descoutures, with a gesture of supreme contempt, she added: "As to the venerable Mme. Bricourt, I do not care a straw for her opinion. As to Paul Frager, he is not at all in love with me. He lives solitary, away from his family, and I intend to keep him for a friend. I must go and take off my habit now. I will be back soon." CHAPTER II. Francis Laviguerie is sixty years old. He is tall and manly looking. He stoops a little when he walks, as if the mighty intellect in his large head were too heavy a burden. His gray hair, with his keen black eyes, give him a soldierly appearance. In fact, he is a soldier. He has fought all his life for what he considers the truth. His early life was one of poverty and privation, but his abilities were soon recognized, and his thirtieth year found him professor in the College of France, proclaiming himself the disciple of Herbert Spencer, whose doctrines he strictly followed. He has long been a member of the Academy of Sciences, and, since 1867, of the French Academy also. In private life he is firm, gentle, simple and unostentatious. His whole life has been one long devotion to science and labor. He has known sorrow of all kinds. Twice married, both wives are dead--one after three years of married life; the other, ten months, each having presented him with a daughter. Germaine and Odette at first were brought up together; but the friends of the philosopher noticed that he showed a great preference for Odette, the youngest, and seemed to ignore Germaine completely. In 1865 Mme. Rozan, a sister of his first wife, happening to come to Paris, begged him to give her the little Germaine--a sickly, nervous child--and he consented gladly in spite of Odette's tears and despair. The little sisters simply worshiped each other, and during the eleven long years that they had been separated, their devoted love had suffered nothing from absence, that great enemy of human affections. They wrote to each other every day, relating every incident of their lives. They knew each other as intimately as if they had never been separated. One wrote about Vesuvius and the beautiful Adriatic; the other, about the fogs and mud of Paris. They sent volumes to each other, and each could have given the most minute descriptions of the other and her surroundings. However, an abyss separated the two sisters. Mme. Rozan, religious without being bigoted, had educated her niece in her own ideas, and it was the greatest grief of Germaine's life that Odette thought differently. By common consent they avoided the dangerous subject of religion; but Germaine never forgot to pray for her misguided sister.