correspondent with the dignity of his rank.

On the plea that his mornings were chiefly devoted to professional
business, Duplessis arranged that these consultations should take place
in the evenings. From those consultations Valerie was not banished;
Duplessis took her into the council as a matter of course. "Valerie,"
said the financier to Alain, "though so young, has a very clear head for
business, and she is so interested in all that interests myself, that
even where I do not take her opinion, I at least feel my own made
livelier and brighter by her sympathy."

So the girl was in the habit of taking her work or her book into the
_cabinet de travail_, and never obtruding a suggestion unasked, still,
when appealed to, speaking with a modest good sense which justified her
father's confidence and praise; and _a propos_ of her book, she had taken
Chateaubriand into peculiar favour. Alain had respectfully presented to
her beautifully bound copies of Atala and Ls Genie du Christianisme; it
is astonishing, indeed, how he had already contrived to regulate her
tastes in literature. The charms of those quiet family evenings had
stolen into the young Breton's heart.

He yearned for none of the gayer reunions in which he had before sought
for a pleasure that his nature had not found; for, amidst the amusements
of Paris, Alain remained intensely Breton--viz., formed eminently for the
simple joys of domestic life, associating the sacred hearthstone with the
antique religion of his fathers; gathering round it all the images of
pure and noble affections which the romance of a poetic temperament had
evoked from the solitude which had surrounded a melancholy boyhood-an
uncontaminated youth.