“Well, well,” said she, blushing still more, and lowering her voice, although we were alone by the fountain, “know that I have been punished for my temerity. On that day I was but a merry, unthinking child, my part came very easily to me; and my _two sisters_, Bernard, and the abbé Lamyre, who were listening behind these rocks, thought that I displayed a gravity of which they would not have deemed me capable. The truth was that in looking at you, and listening to you, I was suddenly seized with an indescribable vertigo. To begin with, I imagined that I was really dead. Destined for the cloister, I spoke to you as a being already set apart from the world of the living. I lost myself in my part, and I felt that I was becoming interested in you. You addressed me with a passion that penetrated my very soul. If you could see my face, I also could see yours—and when I reentered my convent, I feared the vows that I was about to assume, and I felt that while I had tampered with your liberty, I had yielded and lost my own.” As she spoke thus to me, she grew animated. The shrinking modesty of her first avowal had given place to a burst of enthusiastic confidence, she entwined my head in her beautiful, long, supple arms and kissed my forehead saying: “I had promised you solemnly that you should see me again, and I was broken-hearted when I made it, for I feared I could never keep it; and still, something divine, a voice from heaven whispered in my ear—‘Hope, for thou lovest!’” We were united the following month. The settlement of the affairs of Madame d’Ionis (who had now become Madame d’Aillane) was not yet terminated, when the Revolution broke out, which put an end to all contesting on the part of her husband’s creditors, until a new order of things should be established. After the “Terror,” she found herself in easy circumstances, but not wealthy; I then had the joy and pride of being the sole support of my wife. The beautiful château d’Ionis was sold, and the grounds cut up. Some peasants, blinded by a stupid patriotism, had broken the fountain, taking it for the bathing-place of a queen. One day they brought me the head and an arm of the Naiad, which I bought of the mutilator and which I still preserve religiously. But what no one had been able to destroy, was my domestic happiness; and what had withstood, and will continue to withstand all political tempests, unchangeable and pure, is my love for the most beautiful and best of women. FINIS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.