She told me--but this I already knew--how her marriage was brought about. She met my father at a ball given by a great lawyer, who was intimate with her family; their name was De Slane. She described her own dress at this ball, and then sketched my father for me, in his black coat, with an ill-tied white cravat and ill-fitting gloves. "A young girl is always so foolish," she said. "He had himself introduced to us, and he proposed for me twice over. I refused him each time, just because I had those ill-fitting gloves in my mind. The third time he asked to see me in private. Mamma wished very much for the marriage, notwithstanding certain differences in station and education. Your father was such a good man, so clever and hard-working, and then he adored my mother with frank simplicity, just as if she were an idol. Well, she consented to the interview. I received your father with the firm intention of saying 'No' to him, and he spoke to me so nicely, with so much eloquence and such perfect tact, I saw so plainly how much he loved me, that I said 'Yes.' . . . ." What a commentary upon the whole of my father's correspondence was this entry into marriage, what a symbol of the years that were to follow! Yes, even until their last breakfast together before the murder, they had lived thus; she allowing herself to be loved, with the indulgent pride of a woman who knows herself to be the superior in refinement and distinction, and he--the hard-working man of business, only a little above the people--loving that refined and charming woman with an idolatrous sense of her superiority, and a single-hearted unconsciousness of his own. A fatal poison of the heart is silence; I had already learned this too well, and I felt it on that of my father, whose sombre and reserved nature I had inherited. And my mother continued--how heart-rending it was to hear her--dwelling on my father's qualities, on his uprightness, his perseverance, and also certain points in his character which had always puzzled her. "Since he died so sadly," she resumed, "I have often asked myself whether I made him as happy as he might have been. I was very young then, and we had no tastes in common. I have always liked society--that was born with me--and he did not care about it, he did not feel at ease in it. I was very pious, and he was of the school of Voltaire. He believed other men to be as good as himself, and thought we could do without religion. . . . We have seen since his time what that brings us to. He was not jealous, he never once made a remark to me upon the few men friends I had, but there was a restless tendency in him. When he was obliged to leave Paris for a short time, if I chanced to send my daily letter to the post too late, there would surely come a telegram urgently requesting news of my health. If, in the evening, I came home a little later than usual, I would find him in great anxiety, full of the notion that an accident had happened. And