Thus we
See often hearts of men that by love's glow
Are sudden lighted, lifted till they show
All semblances of true nobility;
The passion spent, they tire of purity,
And sink again to their own levels low!

The next time Willan Blaycke came to the Golden Pear he did not see
Victorine. This was by no device of hers, though if she had considered
beforehand she could not better have helped on the impression she had
made on him than by letting him go away disappointed, having come hoping
to see her. She was away on a visit at the home of Pierre Gaspard the
miller, whose eldest daughter Annette was Victorine's one friend in the
parish. There was an eldest son, also, Pierre second, on whom
Mademoiselle Victorine had cast observant glances, and had already
thought to herself that "if nothing else turned up--but there was time
enough yet." Not so thought Pierre, who was madly in love with
Victorine, and was so put about by her cold and capricious ways with him
that he was fast coming to be good for nothing in the mill or on the
farm. But he is of no consequence in this account of the career of
Mademoiselle, only this,--that if it had not been for him she had not
probably been away from the Golden Pear on the occasion of Willan
Blaycke's second visit. Pierre had not shown himself at the inn for some
weeks, and Victorine was uneasy about him. Spite of her plans about a
much finer bird in the bush, she was by no means minded to lose the bird
she had in hand. She was too clear-sighted a young lady not to perceive
that it would be no bad thing to be ultimately Mistress Gaspard of the
mill,--no bad thing if she could not do better, of which she was as yet
far from sure. So she had inveigled her aunt into taking the notion into
her head that she needed change, and the two had ridden over to