Then, suddenly, listening, with panic pulses, she rose, and, the cold moonbeams playing on her white breast and feet, stole to a shadowy corner, and gasped with joy to find _it_ still was there, and felt the soil to see that it was moist, and let her tears drop on the shrunken leaves. She remembered all this the next morning as something that strangely hovered between fact and fancy--a half actual, half dreaming ecstasy like a sleepwalker’s. But, while she could not kill the impression of joy it had recreated in her, she still strove to remain faithful to her resolution of duty to her mother’s memory. That was an impossible compromise, of course; but it sufficed the situation, while matters, owing to the mourning, hung in abeyance. On the 2nd of February, following that fatal December, a solemn requiem mass for the repose of the soul of Madame Louise-Elizabeth of France, eldest daughter of the King, Infanta of Spain, and Duchess of Parma, was sung at Paris in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There were present the Dauphin and Dauphiness, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire, younger sisters of the deceased, and a host of court notables. The funeral oration was pronounced by the Bishop of Troyes, who, says the chronicler, “found nothing to say about the deceased except the usual banalities, and who even pushed hyperbole so far as to eulogise Don Philip, representing him as one ‘adorned with every talent which makes for the first success, with every quality which merits it, unshirking the least labour which assures it.’” That flattery, when it reached the ears of its object, may likely have stimulated him to an emulation, and more than an emulation, of the “pomp and circumstance” of the Parisian “service solennel.” Anyhow, to the public obsequies of the late duchess, which were announced to be held in the Church of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, on the 27th March following, all the ingenuity of symbol and device of which an upholstering brain was capable was brought into play, with a result calculated to impress the most flippant with the dignity and majesty of death as interpreted by a master in the art of “make-up.”