To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young
man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor, the
obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist
decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!
Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty
of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received
by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and
humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic
received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for
her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her
godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's
house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the
cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy,
that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment.
His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for
administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing
Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from
the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.
Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is a very young person in
the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone," he said.
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