Josephine fled from it to the bedside of her little sleeping daughter.
Then, kneeling there by the couch of her child, she uplifted to heaven
her face, down which the tears were streaming, and implored God to spare
her mother.

But, meanwhile, the ship weighed anchor, and sped farther and farther
away from this blazing coast.

Josephine stood on the deck and gazed back at her mother's burning home,
which gradually grew less to her sight, then glimmered only like a tiny
star on the distant horizon, and finally vanished altogether. With that
last ray her childhood and past life had sunk forever in the sea, and a
new world and a new life opened for both mother and child. The past was,
like the ships of Cortez, burned behind her; yet it threw a magic light
far away over into her future, and as Josephine stood there with her
little Hortense in her arms, and sent her last farewell to the island
where her early days had been spent, she bethought her of the old
mulatto-woman who had whispered in her ear one day:

"You will go back to France, and, ere long after that, all France will
be at your feet. You will be greater there than a queen."



CHAPTER II.

THE PROPHECY.

It was toward the close of the year 1790 that Josephine, with her little
daughter, Hortense, arrived in Paris and took up her residence in a