“My mother had on a pretty pink dress that day, and my father was playing some contredanses on his faithful Cremona (I have it yet, that old instrument by the sound of which I first saw the light).  My mother left the dance and passed into her own room.  As she went out very quietly, the dance continued.  At the last chassez all round, my Aunt Lucy went into my mother’s room, and immediately cried,—­

“Come, come here, Maurice!  You have a daughter!”

“She shall be named Aurore, for my poor mother, who is not here to bless her, but who will bless her one day,” said my father, receiving me in his arms.

“She was born in music and in pink,” said my aunt.  “She will be happy.”

Not eminent, perhaps, has been the realization of this augury.

The young couple were so poor, at this moment of their marriage, that a slender thread of gold was forced to serve for the nuptial ring; it was not until some days later that they were able to expend six francs in the purchase of that indispensable ornament.  The act once consummated, Maurice gave himself up to some hours of bitter suffering, made inevitable by what he considered a grave act of disobedience against the best of mothers.  His conscience, however, on the whole, justified him.  He had obeyed the Scripture precept, forsaking the old for the inevitable new relation, and surrounding her who was really his wife with the immunities of civil recognition.  The marriage was concealed for some months from his mother,—­who at a subsequent period left no stone unturned to prove its nullity.  The religious ceremony, which Catholicism considers as the indissoluble tie, had not yet been performed, and Mme. Dupin hoped to prove some informality in the civil rite.  In this, however, she did not succeed, and after long resistance, and ill-concealed displeasure, she concluded by acknowledging the unwelcome alliance.  It was the little Aurore herself whose unconscious hand severed the Gordian knot of the family difficulties.  Introduced by a stratagem into her grandmother’s presence, and seated in her lap as the child of a stranger, the family traits were suddenly recognized, and the little one (eight months old) effected a change of heart which neither lawyer nor priest could have induced.  St. Childhood is fortunately always in the world, working ever these miracles of reconciliation.

George speaks with admirable candor of the inevitable relations between these two women.  She does full justice to the legitimacy of the grandmother’s objections to the marriage, and her fears for its result, which were founded much more on moral than on social considerations.  At the same time she nobly asserts her mother’s claim to rehabilitation through a passionate and disinterested attachment, a faithful devotion to the duties of marriage and maternity, and a widowhood whose sorrow ended only with her life.  She says,—­“The doctrine of redemption