“You remind me, in some respects,” he once remarked, “of little Mabel Coulancourt; so much so, that I get quite bewildered with the resemblance; it is in the eyes, I fancy.” “But why, Monsieur Thornton,” said Julia Plessis, laughing, “do you always call Mademoiselle Coulancourt ‘little Mabel?’ surely she is not a dwarf.” Marie de Tourville looked with a peculiar smile into the lieutenant’s eyes. “Dwarf,” he repeated, “oh, no; I daresay she may be a tall elegant girl. But somehow she always appears before my eyes as the dear, engaging, tender-hearted child, with her thin, pale face, so expressive of all the sufferings she had gone through; and then the pleading look of her large lustrous eyes. I would have sacrificed my boyish life for her; and God knows I would do so now, as for a fondly loved sister.” The lieutenant looked up as he spoke, and Marie de Tourville turned aside her head as if gazing round her; he fancied that her eyes filled with tears. “This is very strange,” thought our hero, “I have observed this emotion before; indeed, it is always obvious whenever we speak of Mabel Coulancourt.” “It is a great pity, Monsieur Thornton,” observed Julia Plessis, with a very demure and serious look, “that you have not been faithful to your fair protégée; instead of loving her as a sister, you ought to have given and kept for her your fondest affection—the affection of a lover.” “You forget, fair Julia,” replied our hero, somewhat seriously, “that when we parted Mabel was but a child. What might have been my feelings in after years, had circumstances thrown us together, who can say? The human heart is a strange piece of mechanism; we can with difficulty control or command its impulses.” “And yet,” said Marie de Tourville, in a low and somewhat agitated voice, “gratitude has a strange power over woman’s heart; who can say but that the child you describe as so precocious and sensitive, may not have grown into womanhood with a deep and overpowering feeling, gradually increasing with increased sensibility, till that one feeling has become the engrossing one of her whole heart, staking her happiness on earth on its being returned?” William Thornton started, and a flush rose to his cheeks as he sought to gaze into the expressive features of his companion, whose eyes sought the ground. He felt uneasy, he knew not why, till Julia, with a light, merry laugh, said gaily—