“Naughty little thing! she is giving him a chain of her hair,” said the doctor to himself. “How did she manage to get it? what a pity to cut those beautiful fair tresses; she will be giving him my life’s blood next.”
“You will not blame me if I ask you to give me, now that I am leaving you, a formal promise to have no other husband than me,” said Savinien, kissing the chain and looking at Ursula with tears in his eyes.
“Have I not said so too often—I who went to see the walls of Sainte-Pelagie when you were behind them?—” she replied, blushing. “I repeat it, Savinien; I shall never love any one but you, and I will be yours alone.”
Seeing that Ursula was half-hidden by the creepers, the young man could not deny himself the happiness of pressing her to his heart and kissing her forehead; but she gave a feeble cry and dropped upon the bench, and when Savinien sat beside her, entreating pardon, he saw the doctor standing before them.
“My friend,” said the old man, “Ursula is a born sensitive; too rough a word might kill her. For her sake you must moderate the enthusiasm of your love—Ah! if you had loved her for sixteen years as I have, you would have been satisfied with her word of promise,” he added, to revenge himself for the last sentence in Savinien’s second letter.
Two days later the young man departed. In spite of the letters which he wrote regularly to Ursula, she fell a prey to an illness without apparent cause. Like a fine fruit with a worm at the core, a single thought gnawed her heart. She lost both appetite and color. The first time her godfather asked her what she felt, she replied:—
“I want to see the ocean.”
“It is difficult to take you to a sea-port in the depth of winter,” answered the old man.
“Shall I really go?” she said.
If the wind was high, Ursula was inwardly convulsed, certain, in spite of the learned assurances of the doctor and the abbe, that Savinien was being tossed about in a whirlwind. Monsieur Bongrand made her happy for days with the gift of an engraving representing a midshipman in uniform. She read the newspapers, imagining that they would give news of the cruiser on which her lover sailed. She devoured Cooper’s sea-tales and learned to use sea-terms. Such proofs of concentration of feeling, often assumed by other women, were so genuine in Ursula that she saw in dreams the coming of Savinien’s letters, and never failed to announce them, relating the dream as a forerunner.