the young girl, hearing footsteps overhead, could say to herself,
"He is there." When Hippolyte went home to his mother at the
dinner hour he never failed to look in on his neighbors, and in
the evening he flew there at the accustomed hour with a lover's
punctuality. Thus the most tyrannical woman or the most ambitious
in the matter of love could not have found the smallest fault
with the young painter. And Adelaide tasted of unmixed and
unbounded happiness as she saw the fullest realization of the
ideal of which, at her age, it is so natural to dream.

The old gentleman now came more rarely; Hippolyte, who had been
jealous, had taken his place at the green table, and shared his
constant ill-luck at cards. And sometimes, in the midst of his
happiness, as he considered Madame de Rouville's disastrous
position--for he had had more than one proof of her extreme
poverty--an importunate thought would haunt him. Several times he
had said to himself as he went home, "Strange! twenty francs
every evening?" and he dared not confess to himself his odious
suspicions.

He spent two months over the portrait, and when it was finished,
varnished, and framed, he looked upon it as one of his best
works. Madame la Baronne de Rouville had never spoken of it
again. Was this from indifference or pride? The painter would not
allow himself to account for this silence. He joyfully plotted
with Adelaide to hang the picture in its place when Madame de
Rouville should be out. So one day, during the walk her mother
usually took in the Tuileries, Adelaide for the first time went
up to Hippolyte's studio, on the pretext of seeing the portrait
in the good light in which it had been painted. She stood