“My friend,” said the old man, “Ursula is a born sensitive; too rough a word might kill her.  For her sake you must moderate the enthusiasm of your love—­Ah! if you had loved her for sixteen years as I have, you would have been satisfied with her word of promise,” he added, to revenge himself for the last sentence in Savinien’s second letter.

Two days later the young man departed.  In spite of the letters which he wrote regularly to Ursula, she fell a prey to an illness without apparent cause.  Like a fine fruit with a worm at the core, a single thought gnawed her heart.  She lost both appetite and color.  The first time her godfather asked her what she felt, she replied:—­

“I want to see the ocean.”

“It is difficult to take you to a sea-port in the depth of winter,” answered the old man.

“Shall I really go?” she said.

If the wind was high, Ursula was inwardly convulsed, certain, in spite of the learned assurances of the doctor and the abbe, that Savinien was being tossed about in a whirlwind.  Monsieur Bongrand made her happy for days with the gift of an engraving representing a midshipman in uniform.  She read the newspapers, imagining that they would give news of the cruiser on which her lover sailed.  She devoured Cooper’s sea-tales and learned to use sea-terms.  Such proofs of concentration of feeling, often assumed by other women, were so genuine in Ursula that she saw in dreams the coming of Savinien’s letters, and never failed to announce them, relating the dream as a forerunner.

“Now,” she said to the doctor the fourth time that this happened, “I am easy; wherever Savinien may be, if he is wounded I shall know it instantly.”

The old doctor thought over this remark so anxiously that the abbe and Monsieur Bongrand were troubled by the sorrowful expression of his face.

“What pains you?” they said, when Ursula had left them.

“Will she live?” replied the doctor.  “Can so tender and delicate a flower endure the trials of the heart?”

Nevertheless, the “little dreamer,” as the abbe called her, was working hard.  She understood the importance of a fine education to a woman of the world, and all the time she did not give to her singing and to the study of harmony and composition she spent in reading the books chosen for her by the abbe from her godfather’s rich library.  And yet while leading this busy life she suffered, though without complaint.  Sometimes she would sit for hours looking at Savinien’s window.  On Sundays she would leave the church behind Madame de Portenduere and watch her tenderly; for, in spite of the old lady’s harshness, she loved her as Savinien’s mother.  Her piety increased; she went to mass every morning, for she firmly believed that her dreams were the gift of God.