her mother.

Yet Hortense was in love; her young heart throbbed painfully at the
thought of not only relinquishing her own love, but of marrying an
unloved man, whom she had never even thought of, and had scarcely
noticed. She deemed it impossible that she could be asked to sacrifice
her own beautiful and blessed happiness, to a cold-blooded calculation,
an artificial family intrigue; and so, with all the enthusiasm of a
first love, she swore rather to perish than to forego her lover.

"But Duroc has no fortune and no future to offer you," said Josephine.
"What he is, he is only through the friendship of Bonaparte. He has no
estate, no importance, no celebrity. Were Bonaparte to abandon him he
would fall back into nothingness and obscurity again."

Hortense replied, smiling through her tears: "I love him, and have no
other ambition than to be his wife."

"But he? Do you think that he too has no other ambition than to become
your husband? Do you think that he loves you for your own sake alone?"

"I know it," said the young girl, with beaming eyes; "Duroc has told me
that he loved me, and me only. He has sworn eternal fidelity and love to
me. Both of us ask for nothing more than to belong to each other."

Josephine shrugged her shoulders almost compassionately.

"Suppose," she rejoined, "that I were to affirm that Duroc is willing to
marry you, only because he is ambitious, and thinks that Bonaparte would
then advance him the more rapidly?"