It was a sorrowful evening, when Count L——­ told his mistress of his father’s determination.

“If I do not give you up, I shall be able to do nothing for you,” he said at last, “and I shall not even know how I should manage to live myself, for my father is just the man to allow me to want, if I defy him.  That, however, is a very secondary consideration; but as a man of honor, I cannot bind you, who have every right to luxury and enjoyment, to myself, from the moment when I cannot even keep you from want, and so I must set you at liberty.”

“But I will not give you up,” Henrietta said proudly.

The young Count shook his head sadly.

“Do you love me?” the ballet girl said, quickly.

“More than my life.”

“Then we will not separate, as long as I have anything,” she continued.

And she would not give up her connection with him, and when his father actually turned Count L——­ into the street, she took her lover into her own lodgings.  He obtained a situation as a copyist clerk in a lawyer’s office, and she sold her valuable dresses and jewels, and so they lived for more than a year.

The young man’s father did not appear to trouble his head about them, but nevertheless he knew everything that went on in their small home, and knew every article that the ballet girl sold; until at last, softened by such love and strength of character, he himself made the first advances to a reconciliation with his son.

At the present time, Henrietta wears the diamonds which formerly belonged to the old Countess, and it is long since she was a ballet girl, for now she sits by the side of her husband in a carriage on whose panels their armorial bearings are painted.

IN HIS SWEETHEART’S LIVERY

At present she is a great lady, an elegant, intellectual woman, a celebrated actress; but in the year 1847, when our story begins, she was a beautiful, but not very moral girl, and then it was that the young, talented Hungarian poet, who was the first to discover her gifts for the stage, made her acquaintance.

The slim, ardent girl, with her bright, brown hair and her large blue eyes, attracted the careless poet, and he loved her, and all that was good and noble in her nature, put forth fresh buds and blossoms in the sunshine of his poetic love.

They lived in an attic in the old Imperial city on the Danube, and she shared his poverty, his triumphs and his pleasures, and she would have become his true and faithful wife, if the Hungarian revolution had not torn him from her arms.

The poet became the soldier of freedom, and followed the Magyar tricolor, and the Honved drums, while she was carried away by the current of the movement in the capital, and she might have been seen discharging her musket, like a brave Amazon, at the Croats, who were defending the town against Goergey’s assaulting battalions.