sacrifice the happiness of her daughter to her own personal welfare; he
blamed her, too, for having forced him into a marriage which love had
not concluded, and, although he never sided with her enemies, Josephine
had, at least, lost a friend in him.

The wedded life of this young couple was something unusually strange.
They had openly confessed the repulsion they felt for each other, and
reciprocally made no secret of the fact that they had been driven into
this union against their own wishes. In this singular interchange of
confidence, they went so far as to commiserate each other, and to
condole with one another as friends, over the wretchedness they endured
in their married bondage.

They said frankly to each other that they could never love; that they
detested one another: but they so keenly felt a mutual compassion, that
out of that very compassion--that very hatred itself--love might
possibly spring into being.

Louis could already sit for hours together beside his wife, busied with
the effort to divert her with amusing remarks, and to drive away the
clouds that obscured her brow; already, too, Hortense had come to regard
it as her holiest and sweetest duty to endeavor to compensate her
husband, by her kindly deportment toward him, and the delicate and
attentive respect that distinguished her bearing, for the unhappiness he
felt beside her; already had both, in fine, begun to console each other
with the reflection that the child which Hortense now bore beneath her
heart would, one day, be to them a compensation for their ill-starred
marriage and their lost freedom.

"When I present you with a son," said Hortense, smiling, "and when he