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Hundreds of the prayers with which we weary Heaven, bring to the suppliant no fulfilment. Once haply in life, one golden gift falls prone in the lap—one boon full and bright, perfect from Fruition’s mint.

M. Emanuel wore the dress in which he probably purposed to travel—a surtout, guarded with velvet; I thought him prepared for instant departure, and yet I had understood that two days were yet to run before the ship sailed. He looked well, and cheerful. He looked kind and benign: he came in with eagerness; he was close to me in one second; he was all amity. It might be his bridegroom-mood which thus brightened him. Whatever the cause, I could not meet his sunshine with cloud. If this were my last moment with him, I would not waste it in forced, unnatural distance. I loved him well—too well not to smite out of my path even Jealousy herself, when she would have obstructed a kind farewell. A cordial word from his lips, or a gentle look from his eyes, would do me good, for all the span of life that remained to me; it would be comfort in the last strait of loneliness; I would take it—I would taste the elixir, and pride should not spill the cup.

The interview would be short, of course: he would say to me just what he had said to each of the assembled pupils; he would take and hold my hand two minutes; he would touch my cheek with his lips for the first, last, only time—and then—no more. Then, indeed, the final parting, then the wide separation, the great gulf I could not pass to go to him—across which, haply, he would not glance, to remember me.

He took my hand in one of his, with the other he put back my bonnet; he looked into my face, his luminous smile went out, his lips expressed something almost like the wordless language of a mother who finds a child greatly and unexpectedly changed, broken with illness, or worn-out by want. A check supervened.

‘Paul, Paul!’ said a woman’s hurried voice behind, ‘Paul, come into the salon; I have yet a great many things to say to you—conversation for the whole day—and so has Victor; and Josef is here. Come, Paul, come to your friends.’

Madame Beck, brought to the spot by vigilance or an inscrutable instinct, pressed so near, she almost thrust herself between me and M. Emanuel. ‘Come, Paul!’ she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried—

‘My heart will break!’

What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the whisper, ‘Trust me!’ lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet with relief—I wept.

‘Leave her to me; it is a crisis; I will give her a cordial, and it will pass,’ said the calm Madame Beck.

To be left to her cordial, seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly—

‘Laissez-moi!’jm in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving.

‘Laissez-moi!’ he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke.

‘But this will never do,’ said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman—

‘Sortez d’ici!’jn

‘I will send for Père Silas; on the spot I will send for him,’ she threatened pertinaciously.

‘Femme!’ cried the professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his highest and most excited key, ‘Femme! sortez à l‘instant!’ jo

He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what I had yet felt.

‘What you do is wrong,’ pursued Madame; ‘it is an act characteristic of men of your unreliable imaginative temperament; a step impulsive, injudicious, inconsistent—a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character.’

‘You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me,’ said he, ‘but you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste,’ he