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Jacqueline — Volume 3 by Th. (Therese) Bentzon
page 39 of 92 (42%)
all over! A sort of mournful resignation had succeeded his bursts of
excited feeling, his revolt against his fate.

This was Fred's state of mind when he received orders to return home--
orders as unexpected as everything seems to be in the life of a naval
man. "I am going back to her!" he cried. Her was his mother, her was
France. All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog. Jacqueline was a
phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times when
he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea; he
had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld misery,
and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he had seen
pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought in him a
sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and
danger. He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as he
passed it, a treacherous flower, with thorns that had wounded him. There
are flowers that are beneficent, and flowers that are poisonous, and the
last are sometimes the most beautiful. They should not be blamed, he
thought; it was their nature to be hurtful; but it was well to pass them
by and not to gather them.

By the time he had debarked Fred had made up his mind to let his mother
choose a wife for him, a daughter-in-law suited to herself, who would
give her the delight of grandchildren, who would bring them up well, and
who would not weary of Lizerolles. But a week later the idea of this
kind of marriage had gone out of his head, and this change of feeling was
partly owing to Giselle. Giselle gave him a smile of welcome that went
to his heart, for that poor heart, after all, was only waiting for a
chance again to give itself away. She was with Madame d'Argy, who had
not been well enough to go to the sea-coast to meet her son, and he saw
at the same moment the pale and aged face which had visited him at
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