A painful sigh was the only reply to this exclamation. The Count looked around, and saw Taddeo standing by him, pale and trembling. IX.--A LETTER. Leaning over the white shoulders of the charming Marquise de Maulear, we are about to tempt our readers to the commission of a great indiscretion. We will force them to listen to a letter which that lady was writing to her mother the Signora Rovero, to inform the latter of all her secret thoughts, and of what during the last two years had taken place in her household. She sat, one morning, about nine o'clock, in a beautiful boudoir, hung with rose-colored silk, over which were falls of India muslin. This room was on the second floor of the house, and there, with her head on her hand, Aminta wrote, on a small table incrusted with Sevres porcelain, the following letter, exhibiting the most intimate thoughts of her soul: "MY KIND MOTHER: Twenty months ago I left Italy and yourself, to accompany the Marquis de Maulear and his excellent father to Paris. Since then my letters have not suffered you to want details of things about which you are so curious, which occurred in the course of my trip from Naples hither, and of my reception by my husband's family. The family of the Marquis, as you already know, is one of the most important of Paris, both from rank, fortune, and nobility, and did not therefore dare to receive with coldness a stranger who came thus to take a place in its bosom. The tender protection of my father-in-law made it a duty to them to seem to me what they really were to him, benevolent, kind, and affectionate. Long ago, I saw that the sentiments they exhibited were not sincere; and I guessed that beneath the affectionate manners of my new family, there was hidden an icy vanity, and want of sympathy with the young woman who had no ancestors, no birth, and almost no fortune, who had thus, as it were, come among them to usurp name, position, and influence, to which no one should pretend who had not a lineage at least as princely as theirs. I soon learned how little faith I should have in their politeness, and the anxiety in my behalf which were exacted by the _exigences_ of society, and above all by the paternal protection of the Prince de Maulear. I was eager to find in the friendship of those with whom I was cast something of that kind reciprocity of sentiments which I was anxious to exhibit to them. The first person to whom I appealed replied to me by cold glances. On this person, dear mother, I relied, not as a substitute for yourself, but as one to advise me in the new life I was about to lead amid a society the customs and language of which I was almost ignorant of. This person was the Countess of Grandmesnil, sister of the Prince, and aunt of my husband. The Countess