it into my heart with the lavishness of the sun itself.  No more veils, no more disguises, my beloved.  Come back to me, oh, come back soon.  With joy I now unmask.

You have no doubt heard of the house of Mignon in Havre?  Well, I am, through an irreparable misfortune, its sole heiress.  But you are not to look down upon us, descendant of an Auvergne knight; the arms of the Mignon de La Bastie will do no dishonor to those of Canalis.  We bear gules, on a bend sable four bezants or; quarterly four crosses patriarchal or; a cardinal’s hat as crest, and the fiocchi for supports.  Dear, I will be faithful to our motto:  “Una fides, unus Dominus!”—­the true faith, and one only Master.

Perhaps, my friend, you will find some irony in my name, after all that I have done, and all that I herein avow.  I am named Modeste.  Therefore I have not deceived you by signing “O. d’Este M.”  Neither have I misled you about our fortune; it will amount, I believe, to the sum which rendered you so virtuous.  I know that to you money is a consideration of small importance; therefore I speak of it without reserve.  Let me tell you how happy it makes me to give freedom of action to our happiness,—­to be able to say, when the fancy for travel takes us, “Come, let us go in a comfortable carriage, sitting side by side, without a thought of money”—­happy, in short, to tell the king, “I have the fortune which you require in your peers.”  Thus Modeste Mignon can be of service to you, and her gold will have the noblest of uses.

As to your servant herself,—­you did see her once, at her window.  Yes, “the fairest daughter of Eve the fair” was indeed your unknown damozel; but how little the Modeste of to-day resembles her of that long past era!  That one was in her shroud, this one —­have I made you know it?—­has received from you the life of life.  Love, pure, and sanctioned, the love my father, now returning rich and prosperous, will authorize, has raised me with its powerful yet childlike hand from the grave in which I slept.  You have wakened me as the sun wakens the flowers.  The eyes of your beloved are no longer those of the little Modeste so daring in her ignorance,—­no, they are dimmed with the sight of happiness, and the lids close over them.  To-day I tremble lest I can never deserve my fate.  The king has come in his glory; my lord has now a subject who asks pardon for the liberties she has taken, like the gambler with loaded dice after cheating Monsieur de Grammont.

My cherished poet!  I will be thy Mignon—­happier far than the Mignon of Goethe, for thou wilt leave me in mine own land,—­in thy heart.  Just as I write this pledge of our betrothal a nightingale in the Vilquin park answers for thee.  Ah, tell me quick that his note, so pure, so clear, so full, which fills my heart with joy and love like an Annunciation, does not lie to me.

My father will pass through Paris on his