“Oh, dear!” said Miss Lucinda.

Don’t laugh at her, Miss Tender-eyes!  You will feel just so yourself some day, when Alexander Augustus says, “Will you be mine, loveliest of jour sex?” only you won’t feel it half so strongly, for you are young, and love is Nature to youth, but it is a heavenly surprise to age.

Monsieur Leclerc said nothing.  He had a heart after all, and it was touched now by the deep emotion that flushed Miss Lucinda’s face, and made her tremble so violently,—­but presently he spoke.

“Do not!” said he.  “I am wrong.  I presume.  Forgive the stranger!”

“Oh, dear!” said poor Lucinda again,—­“oh, you know it isn’t that! but how can you like me?”

There, Mademoiselle! there’s humility for you! you will never say that to Alexander Augustus!

Monsieur Leclerc soothed this frightened, happy, incredulous little woman into quiet before very long; and if he really began to feel a true affection for her from the moment he perceived her humble and entire devotion to him, who shall blame him?  Not I. If we were all heroes, who would be valet-de-chambre? if we were all women, who would be men?  He was very good as far as he went; and if you expect the chivalries of grace out of Nature, you “may expect,” as old Fuller saith.  So it was peacefully settled that they should be married, with a due amount of tears and smiles on Lucinda’s part, and a great deal of tender sincerity on Monsieur’s.  She missed her dancing-lesson next day, and when Monsieur Leclerc came in the evening he found a shade on her happy face.

“Oh, dear!” said she, as he entered.

“Oh, dear!” was Lucinda’s favorite aspiration.  Had she thought of it as an Anglicizing of “O Dieu!” perhaps she would have dropped it; but this time she went on headlong, with a valorous despair,—­

“I have thought of something!  I’m afraid I can’t!  Monsieur, aren’t you a Romanist?”

“What is that?” said he, surprised.

“A Papist,—­a Catholic!”

“Ah!” he returned, sighing, “once I was bon Catholique,—­once in my gone youth; after then I was nothing but the poor man who bats for his life; now I am of the religion that shelters the stranger and binds up the broken poor.”

Monsieur was a diplomatist.  This melted Miss Lucinda’s orthodoxy right down; she only said,—­

“Then you will go to church with me?”

“And to the skies above, I pray,” said Monsieur, kissing her knotty hand like a lover.

So in the earliest autumn they were married, Monsieur having previously presented Miss Lucinda with a delicate plaided gray silk for her wedding attire, in which she looked almost young; and old Israel was present at the ceremony, which was briefly performed by Parson Hyde in Miss Manners’s parlor.  They did not go to Niagara, nor to Newport; but that afternoon Monsieur Leclerc brought a hired rockaway to the door,