“Well, I would rather be loved with the whole of a narrow heart than with a piece of a broad one.”
“O Eva!”
“What dost thou mean, Doucebelle?” said Eva, sharply, turning on her new assailant. “Indeed I would! The man who loves me must love me supremely—must care for nothing but me: must find his sweetest reward for every thing in my smile, and his bitterest pain in my displeasure. That is what I call love.”
“Well! I should call that something else—if Margaret wouldn’t scold,” murmured Marie in an undertone.
“What is that, Marie?” asked Margaret, with a smile.
“Self-conceit; and plenty of it,” said the child.
“Ask Father Bruno what he thinks, Beatrice,” suggested Margaret, after a gentle “Hush!” to the somewhat too plain-spoken Marie. “Thou canst do it, but it would not come so well from us.”
“Dost thou mean to say I am conceited, little piece of impertinence?” inquired Eva, in no dulcet tones.
“Well, I thought thou saidst it thyself,” was the response, for which Marie got chased round the room with the wooden side of an embroidery frame, and, being lithe as a monkey, escaped by flying to the Countess’s rooms, which communicated with those of her daughter by a private staircase.
Father Bruno came up, as he often did, the same evening: but before Beatrice had time to consult him, the small Countess of Eu appeared from nowhere in particular, and put the crucial question in its crudest form.