Le Kain smiled; he was one of those men who love to read the human heart when its leaves are fair and undefiled; and, in the benevolence of science, he would have gone a longer journey than from Louvain to Malines to give sight to the blind, even had St. Amand been a beggar. "Well, well," said he, "but you forget that Monsieur St. Amand is not the only one in the world who wants me. I must look at my note-book, and see if I can be spared for a day or two." So saying he glanced at his memoranda; every thing {59} smiled on Lucille: he had no engagements that his partner could not fulfil, for some days; he consented to accompany Lucille to Malines. Meanwhile cheerless and dull had passed the time to St. Amand; he was perpetually asking Madame Le Tisseur what hour it was; it was almost his only question. There seemed to him no sun in the heavens, no freshness in the air, and he even forbore his favorite music; the instrument had lost its sweetness since Lucille was not by to listen. It was natural that the gossips of Malines should feel some envy at the marriage Lucille was about to make with one whose competence report had exaggerated into prodigal wealth, whose birth had been elevated from the respectable to the noble, and whose handsome person was clothed, by the interest excited by his misfortune, with the beauty of Antinous. Even that misfortune, which ought to have levelled all distinctions, was not sufficient to check the general envy; perhaps to some of the dames of Malines blindness in a husband was indeed not the least agreeable of all qualifications! But there was one in whom this envy rankled with a peculiar sting; it was the beautiful, the all-conquering Julie. That the humble, the neglected Lucille should be preferred to her; that Lucille, whose existence was well-nigh forgot beside Julie's, should become thus suddenly of importance; that there should be one person in the world, and that person young, rich, handsome, to whom she was less than nothing, when weighed in the balance with Lucille, mortified to the quick a vanity that had never till then received a wound. "It is well," she would say, with a bitter jest, "that Lucille's lover is blind. To be the one it is necessary to be the other!" During Lucille's absence she had been constantly in Madame Le Tisseur's house--indeed Lucille had prayed her to be so. She had sought, with an industry that astonished herself, to supply Lucille's place, and among the strange contradictions of human nature, she had learned, during her efforts to please, to love the object of those efforts,--as much at least as she was capable of loving.