He held out before her eyes a little oval frame in which was set a simple profile, a pencil outline wherein she recognised herself, surprised to see herself so pretty, reflected, as it were, in the magic mirror of Love. Tears came into her eyes without her knowing the reason, an open spring whose stream beat within her chaste breast. He continued:
“This portrait belongs to me. It was drawn for me. And yet, at the moment of starting on this journey I have a scruple. I do not wish to have it except from yourself. Take it, then, and if you find a worthier friend, some one who loves you with a love deeper and more loyal than mine, I am willing that you should give it to him.”
She had regained her composure, and looking de Gery full in the face with a serious tenderness, she said:
“If I listened only to my heart, I should feel no hesitation about my reply: for, if you love me as you say, I am sure that I love you too. But I am not free; I am not alone in the world. Look yonder.”
She pointed to her father and her sisters, who were beckoning to them in the distance and hastening to come up with them.
“Well, and I myself?” answered Paul quickly. “Have I not similar duties, similar responsibilities? We are like two widowed heads of families. Will you not love mine as much as I love yours?”
“True? is it true? You will let me stay with them? I shall be Aline for you, and Bonne Maman for all our children? Oh! then,” exclaimed the dear creature, beaming with joy, “there is my portrait—I give it to you! And all my soul with it, too, and forever.”
THE JENKINS PEARLS
About a week after his adventure with Moessard, that new complication in the terrible muddle of his affairs, Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber, one Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to Mora’s house. He had not paid a visit there since the scuffle in the Rue Royale, and the idea of finding himself in the duke’s presence gave him, through his thick skin, something of the panic that agitates a boy on his way upstairs to see the head-master after a fight in the schoolroom. However, the embarrassment of this first interview had to be gone through. They said in the committee-rooms that Le Merquier had completed his report, a masterpiece of logic and ferocity, that it meant an invalidation, and that he was bound to carry it with a high hand unless Mora, so powerful in the Assembly, should himself intervene and give him his word of command. A serious matter, and one that made the Nabob’s cheeks flush, while in the curved mirrors of his brougham he studied his appearance, his courtier’s smiles, trying to think out a way of effecting a brilliant entry, one of those strokes of good-natured effrontery which had brought him fortune with Ahmed, and which served him likewise in his relations with the French ambassador. All this accompanied by beatings of the heart and by those shudders between the shoulder-blades which precede decisive actions, even when these are settled within a gilded chariot.