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"This is yours apparently, Madeleine," said Soeur Lucie, her broad, good-humoured face illumined with a smile at the child's eagerness; "the sight of it has done you good, I think; it is long since you have looked so gay." "Yes, it is mine," cried Madelon; "where had it been all this time, Soeur Lucie?"
And there is one rather dreadful one," continued Septimus, flushing deep carmine, "which has brought me in more money than any of the others: 'Lively little Lucie With her naughty nez retrousse. Of course, I loathe the whole lot of them; in fact, I'm rapidly becoming something of a woman-hater under their influence, but I can't afford to disregard the financial aspect of the matter.
I knew very well that the girls were impostors, and their gentleman-uncle a blackguard; but the die was cast. We found them to be young and pretty. Lucie introduced me as a Venetian, and they were beside themselves with joy to have someone to whom they could talk. I found out directly that they came from Padua, not Venice, as they spoke the Paduan dialect, which I knew very well.
He regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately. So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears, beforehand.
The widower's morning awakening was frightful above all things else-his awakening in the large bed that now had but one pillow. It was there that he had once had the exquisite pleasure of watching his dear Lucie every morning when asleep; for she did not like to get up early, and sometimes he had jokingly scolded her for it.
Well-coached in her exalted functions, very proud of already serving that august lady, Science, my little Lucie would wander about the garden, when the weather seemed propitious, and keep an eye on the Red Ants, having been commissioned to reconnoitre carefully the road to the pillaged Ant-hill. She had given proof of her zeal; I could rely upon it.
Lucie came back an hour later, and expressed her joy and her pride at the wonderful cure she thought she had performed upon me, for the healthy appearance I was then shewing convinced her of my love much better than the pitiful state in which she had found me in the morning. "If your complete happiness," she said, "rests in my power, be happy; there is nothing that I can refuse you."
Gaston says that a soldier's only wife ought to be his sword, and so he intends to remain single; and as Lucie, on her side, has taken the veil at the Ursulines, I feel quite at ease. My race is, so to say, already extinct, and that delights me." Mathieu listened with a smile. He was acquainted with that more or less literary form of pessimism.
My poor little Medee!" Why was it? What did it all mean? His father would return with a forced smile which was pitiful to see. "Well, what did the doctor say?" "Oh, nothing, nothing! You are much better. Only, my poor Lucie, we must put on another blister to-night."
In 1852 the work at Branitz was so far advanced that its lord invited Lucie to come and take up her abode at the Schloss. But the poor lady's troubled life was nearing its close. She had a paralytic stroke in the autumn of this year, and remained an invalid until her death, which took place at Branitz in May, 1854.
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