“If you could imagine,” said she, “a means of flattering this weakness, you will have won our cause.”

The good lady pondered deeply, finished her toilet without Another word, clasped the hands of her future niece, and entered the carriage.

She soon arrived at the Godeau mansion; there, she braced herself up so gallantly for her entrance that she seemed ten years younger.  She majestically crossed the drawing-room where Julie’s bouquet had fallen, and when the door of the boudoir opened, said in a firm voice to the lackey who preceded her: 

“Announce the dowager Baroness de Croisilles.”

These words settled the happiness of the two lovers.  Monsieur Godeau was bewildered by them.  Although five hundred thousand francs seemed little to him, he consented to everything, in order to make his daughter a baroness, and such she became;—­who would dare contest her title?  For my part, I think she had thoroughly earned it.

THE VASE OF CLAY

BY JEAN AICARD

I

Jean had inherited from his father a little field close beside the sea.  Round this field the branches of the pine trees murmured a response to the plashing of the waves.  Beneath the pines the soil was red, and the crimson shade of the earth mingling with the blue waves of the bay gave them a pensive violet hue, most of all in the quiet evening hours dear to reveries and dreams.

In this field grew roses and raspberries.  The pretty girls of the neighborhood came to Jean’s home to buy these fruits and flowers, so like their own lips and cheeks.  The roses, the lips, and the berries had all the same youth, had all the same beauty.

Jean lived happily beside the sea, at the foot of the hills, beneath an olive tree planted near his door, which in all seasons threw a lance-like blue shadow upon his white wall.

Near the olive tree was a well, the water of which was so cold and pure that the girls of the region, with their cheeks like roses and their lips like raspberries, came thither night and morning with their jugs.  Upon their heads, covered with pads, they carried their jugs, round and slender as themselves, supporting them with their beautiful bare arms, raised aloft like living handles.

Jean observed all these things, and admired them, and blessed his life.

As he was only twenty years old, he fondly loved one of the charming girls who drew water from his well, who ate his raspberries and breathed the fragrance of his roses.

He told this younger girl that she was as pure and fresh as the water, as delicious as the raspberries and as sweet as the roses.

Then the young girl smiled.

He told it her again, and she made a face at him.

He sang her the same song, and she married a sailor who carried her far away beyond the sea.