The dawn of Thursday, February 24, 1848, was breaking at the eastward when I arrived with Mrs. Leare, Hermione, the nurse and child at their own apartment. I went up stairs with them. All was cold and cheerless in the rooms. There were no servants. Mrs. Leare sat down; the old nurse bemoaned her rheumatism and her aching bones; Hermione, with the assistance of the concierge's wife, lighted a fire, made some tea and waited on her mother.
For several days afterward she was very ill. She knew nothing of passing events--of the king's flight, of the triumphal and victorious processions that passed up the Champs Élysées, of the sudden impossibility of procuring supplies of change, and of the consequent difficulty of paying household bills with _billets de mille francs_ without gold or silver.
Each day I went several times to make inquiries, and twice I saw Mrs. Leare in bed, but Hermione was invisible.
My father, an honorable British officer of the old school, perceived how things were with me. "My son," he said one clay, "there are two courses open to you. You have nothing but your profession. Your education and the premium on your admittance to the office of the great man for whom you work have been my provision for you: the little property I have to leave must support your sisters. You cannot under such circumstances address Miss Leare. You must either go back at once to your work in England and forget this episode, or you may go out to America and see her father. You can tell him you have nothing on which to support his daughter, and ask if he will give you leave to address the young lady. No son of mine, situated like yourself, shall offer himself in any other way to an heiress whose father is three thousand miles away, and who is supposed to have two millions of francs for her dowry."
I saw he was right, but, forlorn as the hope was of any appeal to Mr. Leare, I would not relinquish it. I resolved to go out to America and see him, and wrote to England to secure letters of introduction to the chief engineers in the United States and Canada. Meantime, my father proposed that we should go together and call upon Mrs. and Miss Leare.
Hermione received us in the boudoir, looking like a bruised lily: her mother came in afterward.