of all which goes to the ordinary summing up of a woman’s beauty.  There was in the glance of her eye a something, I know not what, which no man living could wholly resist.  It was at once defiant and alluring, tender and mocking, artless and mischievous.  No man could make it out; no man might see it twice alike in the space of an hour.  No more was the girl herself twice alike in an hour, or a day, for that matter.  She was far more like some frolicsome creature of the woods than like a mortal woman.  The quality of wildness which Willan had felt in her voice was in her nature.  Neither her grandfather nor her mother had in the least comprehended her during the few months she had lived with them.  A certain gentleness of nature, which was far more physical than mental, far more an idle nonchalance than recognition of relations to others, had blinded them to her real capriciousness and selfishness.  They rarely interfered with her, or observed her with any discrimination.  Their love was content with her surface of good humor, gayety, and beauty; she was an ever-present delight and pride to them both, and that she might only partially reciprocate this fondness never crossed their minds.  They did not realize that during all these eighteen years that they had been caring, planning, and plotting for her their names had represented nothing in her mind except unseen, unknown relatives to whom she was indebted for support, but to whom she also owed what she hated and rebelled against,—­her imprisonment in the convent.  Why should she love them?  Blood tells, however; and when Victorine found herself free, and face to face with the grandfather of whom she had so long heard and only once seen, and the Aunt Jeanne who had been described to her as the loving benefactress of her youth, she had a new and affectionate sentiment towards them.  But she would at any minute have calmly sacrificed them both for the furtherance of her own interests; and the thoughts she was thinking while Willan Blaycke gazed at her so ardently this night were precisely as follows:—­

“If I could only have a good chance at him, I could make him marry me.  I see it in his face.  I suppose I’d never see Aunt Jeanne again, or grandfather; but what of that?  I’d play my cards better than Aunt Jeanne did, I know that much.  Let me once get to be mistress of that stone house—­” And the color grew deeper and deeper on Victorine’s cheeks in the excitement of these reflections.

“Poor girl!” Willan Blaycke was thinking.  “I must not gaze at her so constantly.  The color in her cheeks betrays that I distress her.”  And the honest gentleman tried his best to look away and bear good part in conversation with his friend.  It was a doubly good stroke on the part of the wily Victorine to take her place behind the elder man’s chair.  It looked like a proper and modest preference on her part for age; and it kept her out of the old man’s sight, and in the direct range of Willan’s eyes as he conversed with his friend.  When she had occasion to hand anything to Willan she did so with an apparent shyness which was captivating; and the tone of voice in which she spoke to him was low and timid.