“This is your mamma’s fondest wish, my pretty one: you must keep your heart safe, you must love Huntley, you must give him back half of the inheritance. My poor Marie and I shall live together, and you shall be near us; and then no one will be injured, but all shall have justice. I would I had another little daughter for the good Cosmo, who found me out in St. Ouen. I love the boy, and he shall be with us when he pleases, and we will do for him all we can. But keep your heart safe, my Desirée, for Huntley, and thus let us reward him when he comes home.” Poor Madame Roche! she little knew what a fever of displeasure and indignation this pretty sentimental letter of hers would rouse in her little daughter’s heart. Desirée tore the envelope in pieces in her first burst of vexation, which was meant to express by similitude that she would have torn the letter, and blotted out its injunctions, if she dared. She threw the epistle itself out of her hands as if it had stung her. Not that Desirée’s mind was above those sublime arrangements of poetic justice, which in this inconsequent world are always so futile; but, somehow, a plan which might have looked pretty enough had it concerned another, filled Madame Roche’s independent little daughter with the utmost shame and mortification when she herself was the heroine. “Let him take it all!” she cried out half aloud to herself, in her little chamber. “Do I care for it? I will work--I will be a governess; but I will not sell myself to this Huntley--no, not if I should die!” And having so recorded her determination, poor little Desirée sat down on the floor and had a hearty cry, and after that thought, with a girlish effusion of sympathy, of poor Cosmo, who, after all, had done it all, yet whom no one thought of compensating. When straightway there came into Desirée’s heart some such bitter thoughts of justice and injustice as once had filled the mind of Cosmo Livingstone. Huntley!--what had Huntley done that Madame Roche should dedicate her--_her_, an unwilling Andromeda, to compensate this unknown monster; and Desirée sprang up and stamped her little foot, and clapped her hands, and vowed that no force in the world, not even her mother’s commands, should compel her to show her mother’s gratitude by becoming Huntley’s wife.