Magnetism she certainly had, the dear creature, not only in her glances, indeterminate of colour, veiled or gay like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the draping of her dress, in everything about her, even to the long curl, falling over the neck erect and delicate as a statue’s.

Tea having been served, while the gentlemen finished their cups and talked—­old Joyeuse was always very long over everything he did, by reason of his sudden expeditions to the moon—­the girls brought out their work, the table became covered with wicker baskets, embroideries, pretty wools that rejuvenated with their bright tints the faded flowers of the old carpet, and the group of the other evening gathered once more within the bright circle defined by the lamp-shade, to the great satisfaction of Paul de Gery.  It was the first evening of the kind that he had spent in Paris; it recalled to him others of a like sort very far away, lulled by the same innocent laughter, the peaceful sound produced by scissors as they are put down on the table, by a needle as it pierces through linen, or the rustle of a page turned over, and dear faces, disappeared for ever, gathered also around the family lamp, alas! so abruptly extinguished.

Having been admitted to this charming intimacy, he remained in it, took his lessons in the presence of the girls and was encouraged to chat with them when the good old man closed his big book.  Here everything rested him after the whirl of that life into which he was thrown by the luxurious social existence of the Nabob; he come to renew his strength in this atmosphere of honesty, of simplicity, tried, too, to find healing there for the wounds with which a hand more indifferent than cruel stabbed his heart mercilessly.

“Some women have hated me, other women have loved me.  She who has hurt me most never either loved or hated me.”  Paul had met that woman of whom Henri Heine speaks.  Felicia was full of welcome and cordiality for him.  There was no one whom she treated with more favour.  She used to reserve for him a special smile wherein one felt the kindliness of an artist’s eye arrested by and dwelling on a pleasing type, and the satisfaction of a jaded mind amused by anything new, however simple in appearance it may be.  She liked that reserve, suggestive in a southerner, the honesty of that judgment, independent of every artistic or social formula and enlivened by a touch of provincial accent.  These things were a change for her from the zigzag stroke of the thumb illustrating a eulogy with its gesture of the studio, from the compliments of comrades on the way in which she would snub some old fellow, or again from those affected admirations, from the “char-ar-ming, very nice indeed’s” with which young men about town, sucking the knobs of their canes, were accustomed to regale her.  This young man at any rate did not say such things as that to her.  She had nicknamed him Minerva, on account of his apparent tranquility and the regularity of his profile; and the moment she saw him, however far-off, she would call: