“Ah!” she cried with an accent of heavenly pity, and took his hand with both hers.

This was like the meridian sun coming suddenly on a cold place.  He was all happiness.

When Josephine heard he was come her eye flashed, and she said quickly, “I will come down to welcome him—­dear Edouard!”

The sisters looked at one another.  Josephine blushed.  Rose smiled and kissed her.  She colored higher still, and said, “No, she was ashamed to go down.”

“Why?”

“Look at my face.”

“I see nothing wrong with it, except that it eclipses other people’s, and I have long forgiven you that.”

“Oh, yes, dear Rose:  look what a color it has, and a fortnight ago it was pale as ashes.”

“Never mind; do you expect me to regret that?”

“Rose, I am a very bad woman.”

“Are you, dear? then hook this for me.”

“Yes, love.  But I sometimes think you would forgive me if you knew how hard I pray to be better.  Rose, I do try so to be as unhappy as I ought; but I can’t, I can’t.  My cold heart seems as dead to unhappiness as once it was to happiness.  Am I a heartless woman after all?”

“Not altogether,” said Rose dryly.  “Fasten my collar, dear, and don’t torment yourself.  You have suffered much and nobly.  It was Heaven’s will:  you bowed to it.  It was not Heaven’s will that you should be blighted altogether.  Bow in this, too, to Heaven’s will:  take things as they come, and do cease to try and reconcile feelings that are too opposite to live together.”

“Ah! these are such comfortable words, Rose; but mamma will see this dreadful color in my cheek, and what can I say to her?”

“Ten to one it will not be observed; and if it should, I will say it is the excitement of seeing Edouard.  Leave all to me.”

Josephine greeted Edouard most affectionately, drew from him his whole history, and petted him and sympathized with him deliciously, and made him the hero of the evening.  Camille, who was not naturally of a jealous temper, bore this very well at first, but at last he looked so bitter at her neglect of him, that Rose took him aside to soothe him.  Edouard, missing the auditor he most valued, and seeing her in secret conference with the brilliant colonel, felt a return of the jealous pangs that had seized him at first sight of the man; and so they played at cross purposes.

At another period of the evening the conversation became more general; and Edouard took a dislike to Colonel Dujardin.  A young man of twenty-eight nearly always looks on a boy of twenty-one with the air of a superior, and this assumption, not being an ill-natured one, is apt to be so easy and so undefined that the younger hardly knows how to resent or to resist it.  But Edouard was a little vain as we know; and the Colonel jarred him terribly.  His quick haughty eye jarred him.  His regimentals jarred him:  they fitted like a glove.  His mustache and his manner jarred him, and, worst of all, his cool familiarity with Rose, who seemed to court him rather than be courted by him.  He put this act of Rose’s to the colonel’s account, according to the custom of lovers, and revenged himself in a small way by telling Josephine in her ear “that the colonel produced on his mind the effect of an intolerable puppy.”