She gave a short sigh of complete dissatisfaction.

“To be loved, Katrine—­really loved!  What a delicious thing that would be!  Have you ever felt it?”

The poor lady trembled a little, and gave a somewhat mournful smile.

“No, you dear romantic child!  I cannot say with truth that I have!  I married when I was very young, and my husband was many years older than myself.  He was afflicted with chronic rheumatism and gout, and to be quite honest, I could never flatter myself that he thought of me more than the gout.  There!  I knew that would amuse you!”—­this, as Sylvie’s pretty tender laugh rippled out again on the air, “And though it sounds as if it were a jest, it is perfectly true.  Poor Monsieur Bozier!  He was the drawing master at the school where I was assistant governess,—­and he was very lonely; he wanted someone to attend to him when the gouty paroxysms came on, and he thought I should do as well, perhaps better than anyone else.  And I—­I had no time to think about myself at all, or to fall in love—­I was very glad to be free of the school, and to have a home of my own.  So I married him, and did my best to be a good nurse to him,—­but he did not live long, poor man—­you see he always would eat things that did not agree with him, and if he could not get them at home he went out and bought them on the sly.  There was no romance there, my dear!  And of course he died.  And he left me nothing at all,—­even our little home was sold up to pay our debts.  Then I had to work again for my living,—­and it was by answering an advertisement in the Times, which applied for an English governess to go to a family in Budapest, that I first came to know you.”

“And that is all your history!” said Sylvie, “Poor dear Bozier!  How uneventful!”

“Yes, it is,” and the worthy lady sighed also, but hers, was a sigh of placid arid philosophical comfort.  “Still, my dear, I am not at all sorry to be uninteresting!  I have rather a terror of lives that arrange themselves into grand dramas, with terrible love affairs as the central motives.”

“Have you?  I have not!” said Sylvie thoughtfully,—­“With all my heart I admire a ‘grande passion.’  Sometimes I think it is the only thing that makes history.  One does not hear nearly so much of the feuds in which Dante was concerned, as of his love for Beatrice.  It is always so, only few people are capable of the strength and patience and devotion needed for this great consummation of life.  Now I—­”

Madame Bozier smiled, and with tender fingers arranged one of the stray knots of pearls with which Sylvie’s white gown was adorned.

“You dear child!  You were made for sweetness and caresses,—­not suffering . . .”

“You mistake!” said Sylvie, with sudden decision, “You, in your fondness for me, and because you have seen me grow up from childhood, sometimes still view me as a child, and think that I am best amused with frivolities, and have not the soul in me that would endure disaster.  But for love’s sake I would do anything—­yes! . . . anything!”