result of some deep calculation.

Just at this time His Eminence, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Bourges,
had converted to the Catholic faith a young person, the daughter of
one of the citizen families, who were the first upholders of
Calvinism, and who, thanks to their obscurity or to some compromise
with Heaven, had escaped from the persecutions under Louis XIV. The
Piedefers--a name that was obviously one of the quaint nicknames
assumed by the champions of the Reformation--had set up as highly
respectable cloth merchants. But in the reign of Louis XVI., Abraham
Piedefer fell into difficulties, and at his death in 1786 left his two
children in extreme poverty. One of them, Tobie Piedefer, went out to
the Indies, leaving the pittance they had inherited to his elder
brother. During the Revolution Moise Piedefer bought up the
nationalized land, pulled down abbeys and churches with all the zeal
of his ancestors, oddly enough, and married a Catholic, the only
daughter of a member of the Convention who had perished on the
scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving a little girl
of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the Calvinist faith,
was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use among the sect,
of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to have nothing
in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.

Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer was placed by her mother in one of the
best schools in Bourges, that kept by the Demoiselles Chamarolles, and
was soon as highly distinguished for the qualities of her mind as for
her beauty; but she found herself snubbed by girls of birth and
fortune, destined by-and-by to play a greater part in the world than a
mere plebeian, the daughter of a mother who was dependent on the
settlement of Piedefer's estate. Dinah, having raised herself for the