delight; his mother taught him music, and their tender, melancholy songs, accompanied by a mandolin, were the favorite recreation promised as a reward for some more arduous study required by the Abbe de Sebonde.  Etienne listened to his mother with a passionate admiration she had never seen except in the eyes of Georges de Chaverny.  The first time the poor woman found a memory of her girlhood in the long, slow look of her child, she covered him with kisses; and she blushed when Etienne asked her why she seemed to love him better at that moment than ever before.  She answered that every hour made him dearer to her.  She found in the training of his soul, and in the culture of his mind, pleasures akin to those she had tasted in feeding him with her milk.  She put all her pride and self-love into making him superior to herself, and not in ruling him.  Hearts without tenderness covet dominion, but a true love treasures abnegation, that virtue of strength.  When Etienne could not at first comprehend a demonstration, a theme, a theory, the poor mother, who was present at the lessons, seemed to long to infuse knowledge, as formerly she had given nourishment at the child’s least cry.  And then, what joy suffused her eyes when Etienne’s mind seized the true sense of things and appropriated it.  She proved, as Pierre de Sebonde said, that a mother is a dual being whose sensations cover two existences.

“Ah, if some woman as loving as I could infuse into him hereafter the life of love, how happy he might be!” she often thought.

But the fatal interests which consigned Etienne to the priesthood returned to her mind, and she kissed the hair that the scissors of the Church were to shear, leaving her tears upon them.  Still, in spite of the unjust compact she had made with the duke, she could not see Etienne in her visions of the future as priest or cardinal; and the absolute forgetfulness of the father as to his first-born, enabled her to postpone the moment of putting him into Holy Orders.

“There is time enough,” she said to herself.

The day came when all her cares, inspired by a sentiment which seemed to enter into the flesh of her son and give it life, had their reward.  Beauvouloir—­that blessed man whose teachings had proved so precious to the child, and whose anxious glance at that frail idol had so often made the duchess tremble—­declared that Etienne was now in a condition to live long years, provided no violent emotion came to convulse his delicate body.  Etienne was then sixteen.

At that age he was just five feet, a height he never passed.  His skin, as transparent and satiny as that of a little girl, showed a delicate tracery of blue veins; its whiteness was that of porcelain.  His eyes, which were light blue and ineffably gentle, implored the protection of men and women; that beseeching look fascinated before the melody of his voice was heard to complete the charm.  True modesty was in every feature.  Long chestnut hair, smooth