Though I felt
sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my
room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I
hunted about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous
fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had
ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that
possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I
opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid
ten-franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and
slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account
for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty
in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity,
and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply,
to find Pauline with a face grown white.
"'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that
I felt as if I had stolen from them.
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