seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!"

She sighed deeply.

"He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to
herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.
--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to
hope to see my children happy."

"Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this
critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that
dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this
essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a
man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to
the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money
at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?"

"Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense.

The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this
complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so
heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence.

"Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over.
But do not quarrel any more."

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out
the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:

"Tell me all about last evening."