real in the things of life, and it insists on its supremacy.  Charles d’Estourny, gambler, criminal, and debauchee, remained in the memory of the sisters, the elegant Parisian of the fetes of Havre, the admired of the womenkind.  Bettina believed she had carried him off from the coquettish Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he was her sister’s happy lover.  Such adoration in young girls is stronger than all social condemnations.  To Bettina’s thinking, justice had been deceived; if not, how could it have sentenced a man who had loved her for six months?—­loved her to distraction in the hidden retreat to which he had taken her,—­that he might, we may add, be at liberty to go his own way.  Thus the dying girl inoculated her sister with love.  Together they talked of the great drama which imagination enhances; and Bettina carried with her to the grave her sister’s ignorance, leaving her, if not informed, at least thirsting for information.

Nevertheless, remorse had set its fangs too sharply in Bettina’s heart not to force her to warn her sister.  In the midst of her own confessions she had preached duty and implicit obedience to Modeste.  On the evening of her death she implored her to remember the tears that soaked her pillow, and not to imitate a conduct which even suffering could not expiate.  Bettina accused herself of bringing a curse upon the family, and died in despair at being unable to obtain her father’s pardon.  Notwithstanding the consolations which the ministers of religion, touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she cried in heartrending tones with her latest breath:  “Oh father! father!” “Never give your heart without your hand,” she said to Modeste an hour before she died; “and above all, accept no attentions from any man without telling everything to papa and mamma.”

These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the hour of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had exacted a solemn oath.  The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from beneath her pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid, Francoise Cochet, to be engraved in Havre with these words, “Think of Bettina, 1827,” and placed it on her sister’s finger, begging her to keep it there until she married.  Thus there had been between these two young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were always subordinate to their horror of evil.

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste’s life, by which alone the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends can take the place of a mother’s eye.  The monotonous life in the dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers