specially melt her spatial chief

street.
Hortense, in the first impulse of her distress and horror, would have
sprung down after her beloved mother, and could only be held back with
the greatest difficulty. But this time fate had spared the young girl,
and refrained from darkening the pure, unclouded heaven of her youth.
Her mother escaped with no other injury than the fright, and a slight
wound on her arm, while one of the ladies had both legs broken.

Josephine's time to die had not yet come, for the prophecy of the
fortune-teller had not yet been fulfilled. Josephine was, indeed, the
wife of a renowned general, but she was not yet "something more than
a queen."



CHAPTER VIII.

BONAPARTE'S RETURN FROM EGYPT.

Bonaparte had got back from Egypt. His victory at Aboukir had adorned
his brows with fresh laurels, and all France hailed the returning
conqueror with plaudits of exulting pride. For the first time, Hortense
was present at the festivities which the city of Paris dedicated to her
step-father; for the first time she saw the homage that men and women,
graybeards and children alike, paid to the hero of Italy and Egypt.
These festivities and this homage filled her heart with a tremor of
alarm, and yet, at the same time, with joyous exultation. In the midst
of these triumphs and these ovations which were thus offered to her
second father, the young girl recalled the prison in which her mother
had once languished, the scaffold upon which the head of her own father
had fallen; and frequently when she glanced at the rich gold-embroidered
uniform of her brother, she reminded him with a roguish smile of the
time when Eugene went in a blue blouse, as a carpenter's apprentice,
through the streets of Paris with a long plank on his shoulder.

These recollections of the first terrible days of her youth kept
Hortense from feelin


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