patience and devotion of a Sister of Charity. Through all Madame
d'Argy's letters at this period the angelic figure of Giselle was
contrasted with the very different one of that young and incorrigible
little devil of a Jacqueline.

Fred at first believed his mother's stories were all exaggeration, but
the facts were there, corroborated by the continued silence of the person
concerned. He knew his mother to be too good wilfully to blacken the
character of one whom for years she had hoped would be her daughter-in-
law, the only child of her best friend, the early love of her son. But
by degrees he fancied that the love so long living at the bottom of his
heart was slowly dying, that it had been extinguished, that nothing
remained of it but remembrance, such remembrance as we retain for dead
things, a remembrance without hope, whose weight added to the
homesickness which with him was increasing every day.

There was no active service to enable him to endure exile. The heroic
period of the war had passed. Since a treaty of peace had been signed
with China, the fleet, which had distinguished itself in so many small
engagements and bombardments, had had nothing to do but to mount guard,
as it were, along a conquered coast. All round it in the bay, where it
lay at anchor, rose mountains of strange shapes, which seemed to shut it
into a kind of prison. This feeling of nothing to be done--of nothing
likely to be done, worked in Fred's head like a nightmare. The only
thing he thought of was how he could escape, when could he once more kiss
the faded cheeks of his mother, who often, when he slept or lay wakeful
during the long hours of the siesta, he saw beside him in tears. Hers
was the only face that he recalled distinctly; to her and to her only
were devoted his long reveries when on watch; that time when he formerly
composed his love verses, tender or angry, or full of despair. That was