by all the strength of her youth, the weariness of her solitude, and the unspent energy of her character.  Love is in a young girl the effect of a natural law; but when her craving for affection is centered in an exceptional man, it is mingled with the enthusiasm which overflows in a youthful heart.  Thus Mademoiselle de Watteville had in a few days reached a morbid and very dangerous stage of enamored infatuation.  The Baroness was much pleased with her daughter, who, being under the spell of her absorbing thoughts, never resisted her will, seemed to be devoted to feminine occupations, and realized her mother’s ideal of a docile daughter.

The lawyer was now engaged in Court two or three times a week.  Though he was overwhelmed with business, he found time to attend the trials, call on the litigious merchants, and conduct the Review; keeping up his personal mystery, from the conviction that the more covert and hidden was his influence, the more real it would be.  But he neglected no means of success, reading up the list of electors of Besancon, and finding out their interests, their characters, their various friendships and antipathies.  Did ever a Cardinal hoping to be made Pope give himself more trouble?

One evening Mariette, on coming to dress Rosalie for an evening party, handed to her, not without many groans over this treachery, a letter of which the address made Mademoiselle de Watteville shiver and redden and turn pale again as she read the address: 

  To Madame la Duchesse d’Argaiolo
  (nee Princesse Soderini)
    At Belgirate,
      Lago Maggiore, Italy.

In her eyes this direction blazed as the words Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, did in the eyes of Belshazzar.  After concealing the letter, Rosalie went downstairs to accompany her mother to Madame de Chavoncourt’s; and as long as the endless evening lasted, she was tormented by remorse and scruples.  She had already felt shame at having violated the secrecy of Albert’s letter to Leopold; she had several times asked herself whether, if he knew of her crime, infamous inasmuch as it necessarily goes unpunished, the high-minded Albert could esteem her.  Her conscience answered an uncompromising “No.”

She had expiated her sin by self-imposed penances; she fasted, she mortified herself by remaining on her knees, her arms outstretched for hours, and repeating prayers all the time.  She had compelled Mariette to similar sets of repentance; her passion was mingled with genuine asceticism, and was all the more dangerous.

“Shall I read that letter, shall I not?” she asked herself, while listening to the Chavoncourt girls.  One was sixteen, the other seventeen and a half.  Rosalie looked upon her two friends as mere children because they were not secretly in love.—­“If I read it,” she finally decided, after hesitating for an hour between Yes and No, “it shall, at any rate, be the last.  Since I have gone so far as to see what he wrote to his friend, why should I not know what he says to her?  If it is a horrible crime, is it not a proof of love?  Oh, Albert! am I not your wife?”