The marquise believed every word.  In her answer, she certainly reproached her daughter gently for having anything to do with foreign conspirators, but otherwise praised her evidence of gratitude toward her preserver, and frankly expressed her admiration for the handsome person of this interesting German.  She even inclosed a note to him, in which she thanked him from her overflowing mother’s heart for all he had done for her only child, and adjured him to be very prudent.  He could make nothing out of it, and Pilar declared that she was equally in the dark.  “I only see this much,” she said in an off-hand manner, “that mamma loves you already, and will do still more so when she gets to know you personally.  And that is all that matters.”

It was on the second Sunday after their arrival in Paris that the children came to visit their mother.  Pilar looked forward with some uneasiness to Wilhelm’s first meeting with them, and he too felt far from comfortable when Pilar brought a half-grown girl and a ten-year old boy to him, and addressing herself to them said, “Embrace Monsieur le Docteur, and look at him well.  He is the best friend your mother has on earth.  You must love him very much, for he deserves it.”

The girl was fair like her mother.  She was already dressed with conspicuous elegance, and her manner betrayed extreme self-consciousness.  She glanced at Wilhelm with sly and wanton eyes, in which it was easily to be read that she had a very good idea of the real state of the case.  She offered her forehead for his kiss, bestowed a few cold and perfunctory caresses on her mother, and slipped away to Anne, with whom she spent the whole afternoon in eager whispered conversation, till the governess came to take her back to the fashionable boarding school where she was being trained to be a perfect great lady, and to make some enviable man happy in the future by the bestowal of her hand.

The boy, who was accompanied by a priest, and was being educated at a fashionable Jesuit institution, was of a better sort.  He gave his hand to Wilhelm shyly but heartily, while his innocent eyes looked frankly and openly into his, and then hung over his mother with a tenderness that had a touch of chivalry in it—­half-funny, half-affecting.  Wilhelm felt decidedly drawn to the slender, healthy-looking boy.

But in the course of the afternoon another—­a third child—­appeared upon the scene; a lovely, brown, four-year-old boy, with bold black eyes and long raven curls, whom a maid-servant brought to Pilar that he might kiss his mamma.

Wilhelm was much surprised.  “Three?  You never told me that,” he whispered.