at once that little comedy of exaggerated religious feeling.

"Never mind that," said he, with condescension, "it is I who have failed
in form. For at heart you have always found me respectful of that which
my fathers respected. But times have changed, and certain fanaticisms
are no longer admissible. That is what I have wished to say to you in
such a manner that you could take no offence."

And he gallantly kissed Fanny's tiny hand, not divining that he had
redoubled the melancholy of that too-generous child. The discord
continued to be excessive between the world of ideas in which she moved
and that in which the ruined Prince existed. As the mystics say with so
much depth, they were not of the same heaven.

Of all the chimeras which had lasted hours, God alone remained. It
sufficed the noble creature to say: "My father is so happy, I will not
mar his joy."

"I will do my duty toward my husband. I will be so good a wife that I
will transform him. He has religion. He has heart. It will be my role
to make of him a true Christian. And then I shall have my children and
the poor." Such were the thoughts which filled the mind of the envied
betrothed. For her the journals began to describe the dresses already
prepared, for her a staff of tailors, dressmakers, needlewomen and
jewellers were working; she would have on her contract the same signature
as a princess of the blood, who would be a princess herself and related
to one of the most glorious aristocracies in the world. Such were the
thoughts she would no doubt have through life, as she walked in the
garden of the Palais Castagna, that historical garden in which is still
to be seen a row of pear-trees, in the place where Sixte-Quint, near