The Doctor she regarded with a _naïve_ astonishment, slightly tinctured with apprehension. She knew he was very religious, and stretched her comprehension to imagine what he might be like. She thought of Bossuet's sermons walking about under a Protestant coat, and felt vaguely alarmed and sinful in his presence, as she used to when entering under the shadows of a cathedral. In her the religious sentiment, though vague, was strong. Nothing in the character of Burr had ever awakened so much disapprobation as his occasional sneers at religion. On such occasions she always reproved him with warmth, but excused him in her heart, because he was brought up a heretic. She held a special theological conversation with the Abbé, whether salvation were possible to one outside of the True Church,--and had added to her daily prayer a particular invocation to the Virgin for him. The French lessons, with her assistance, proceeded prosperously. She became an inmate in Mrs. Marvyn's family also. The brown-eyed, sensitive woman loved her as a new poem; she felt enchanted by her; and the prosaic details of her household seemed touched to poetic life by her innocent interest and admiration. The young Madame insisted on being taught to spin at the great wheel; and a very pretty picture she made of it, too, with her earnest gravity of endeavor, her deepening cheek, her graceful form, with some strange foreign scarf or jewelry waving and flashing in odd contrast with her work. "Do you know," she said, one day, while thus employed in the north room at Mrs. Marvyn's,--"do you know Burr told me that princesses used to spin? He read me a beautiful story from the 'Odyssey,' about how Penelope cheated her lovers with her spinning, while she was waiting for her husband to come home;--_he_ was gone to sea, Mary,--her _true_ love,--you understand." She turned on Mary a wicked glance, so full of intelligence that the snowdrop grew red as the inside of a sea-shell. "_Mon enfant_! thou hast a thought _deep in here_!" she said to Mary, one day, as they sat together in the grass under the apple-trees. "Why, what?" said Mary, with a startled and guilty look. "Why, what? _petite_!" said the fairy princess, whimsically mimicking her accent. "_Ah! ah! ma belle_! you think I have no eyes;--Virginie sees deep in here!" she said, laying her hand playfully on Mary's heart. "_Ah, petite_!" she said, gravely, and almost sorrowfully, "if you love him, wait for him,--_don't marry another_. It is dreadful not to have one's heart go with one's duty." "I shall never marry anybody," said Mary. "Nevare marrie anybodie!" said the lady, imitating her accents in tones much like those of a bobolink. "Ah! ah! my little saint, you cannot always live on nothing but the prayers, though prayers are verie good. But, _ma chère_," she added, in a low tone, "don't you ever marry that good man in there; priests should not marry."