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Annette appeared to him, now, as the prize, the reward, of a battle in which Mrs. Paula Markham was his antagonist. As he turned the corner into her street, ten years rolled away from him; he dreamed the childish, impossible dreams of a very youth. She might be coming down the steps as he passed. Fate might even send a drunkard or an obstreperous cabman for him to thrash in her service.
It was a heavy blow to his widowed mother, for he was her only pride and comfort; but it was one of those sudden bereavements which mothers were perpetually doomed to feel in France, during the time that continual and bloody wars were incessantly draining her youth. It was a temporary affliction also to Annette, to lose her lover.
The populace crowded down to the pier-head, to welcome it. Annette stood blushing, and smiling, and trembling, and weeping; for a thousand painfully-pleasing emotions agitated her breast at the thoughts of the meeting and reconciliation about to take place. Her heart throbbed to pour itself out, and atone to her gallant lover for all its errors.
Lasette for affording him a rare and charming pleasure. Annette sat alone in her humble room with a new light in her eyes and a sense of deep enjoyment flooding her soul. Never before had she met with such an interesting and congenial gentleman. He seemed to understand as scarcely as any one else had done or cared to do.
Annette, in pity of his bewilderment, would have had her father take him into their confidence. She suggested it covertly, and next she spoke of it to him as a prudent measure, seeing that Mr. Fellingham might find out his exact degree of liability. Van Diemen shouted; he betrayed himself in his weakness as she could not have imagined him.
Annette was well known, for, in hopes of some day being an occupant of one of the dressing-rooms, she had made friends with everyone connected with the opera. Eleazar received them, still wearing his brown garb and patriarchal beard. "How you deceived me!" she laughed, when the greetings and introductions were over.
She reached out her hand as if to meet a welcome and precious friend, and then the radiant face grew deathly pale; the outstretched hands relaxed their position, and with a smile, just such a smile as might greet a welcoming angel, her spirit passed out into the eternities, and Annette felt as she had never felt before, that she was all alone.
"Annette is always afraid of strangers; and see, she is not shy with his reverence at all. The wonderful thing! Kneel down, Annette, and ask the good monsieur's blessing before he goes; it will bring thee luck." "I didn't know you could play with children that way, Padre," Arthur said an hour later, as they walked through the sunlit pasture-land.
No one ever saw that ruin again, and for days Frank was utterly unconscious of Molly's existence, as propriety forbade his having it out with her as he had with Grif. Then Annette made peace between them, and the approach of the Twenty-second gave the wags something else to think of.
She looked at Charles, then she gently took his head and placed it against the back of the chair; he let her do so, like a child which, though asleep, knows its mother's touch and receives, without awaking, her kisses and watchful care. Like a mother Eugenie raised the drooping hand, and like a mother she gently kissed the chestnut hair "Dear Annette!" a demon shrieked the words in her ear.
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