Frowenfeld’s visits were not infrequent; he insisted on Clotdlde’s knowing just what was being done with her money.  Without indulging ourselves in the pleasure of contemplating his continued mental unfolding, we may say that his growth became more rapid in this season of universal expansion; love had entered into his still compacted soul like a cupid into a rose, and was crowding it wide open.  However, as yet, it had not made him brave.  Aurora used to slip out of the drawing-room, and in some secluded nook of the hall throw up her clasped hands and go through all the motions of screaming merriment.

“The little fool!”—­it was of her own daughter she whispered this complimentary remark—­“the little fool is afraid of the fish!”

“You!” she said to Clotilde, one evening after Joseph had gone, “you call yourself a Creole girl!”

But she expected too much.  Nothing so terrorizes a blushing girl as a blushing man.  And then—­though they did sometimes digress—­Clotilde and her partner met to talk “business” in a purely literal sense.

Aurora, after a time, had taken her money into her own keeping.

“You mighd gid robb’ ag’in, you know, ’Sieur Frowenfel’,” she said.

But when he mentioned Clotilde’s fortune as subject to the same contingency, Aurora replied: 

“Ah! bud Clotilde mighd gid robb’!”

But for all the exuberance of Aurora’s spirits, there was a cloud in her sky.  Indeed, we know it is only when clouds are in the sky that we get the rosiest tints; and so it was with Aurora.  One night, when she had heard the wicket in the porte-cochere shut behind three evening callers, one of whom she had rejected a week before, another of whom she expected to dispose of similarly, and the last of whom was Joseph Frowenfeld, she began such a merry raillery at Clotilde and such a hilarious ridicule of the “Professor” that Clotilde would have wept again had not Aurora, all at once, in the midst of a laugh, dropped her face in her hands and run from the room in tears.  It is one of the penalties we pay for being joyous, that nobody thinks us capable of care or the victim of trouble until, in some moment of extraordinary expansion, our bubble of gayety bursts.  Aurora had been crying of nights.  Even that same night, Clotilde awoke, opened her eyes and beheld her mother risen from the pillow and sitting upright in the bed beside her; the moon, shining brightly through the mosquito-bar revealed with distinctness her head slightly drooped, her face again in her hands and the dark folds of her hair falling about her shoulders, half-concealing the richly embroidered bosom of her snowy gown, and coiling in continuous abundance about her waist and on the slight summer covering of the bed.  Before her on the sheet lay a white paper.  Clotilde did not try to decipher the writing on it; she knew, at sight, the slip that had fallen from the statement of account on the evening of the ninth of March.  Aurora withdrew her hands from her face—­Clotilde shut her eyes; she heard Aurora put the paper in her bosom.