Such griefs were singularly moving to the hearts of the two young girls, who were themselves deprived of all tenderness.

Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters, with an arm round each little waist, and stepping with their own short steps, the father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight of the house, and kiss them on their foreheads; his eyes, his lips, his whole countenance expressing the deepest commiseration.
"You are not very happy, my dear little girls," he said one day; "but I shall marry you early.

It will comfort me to have you leave home." "Papa," said Eugenie, "we have decided to take the first man who offers." "Ah!" he cried, "that is the bitter fruit of such a system.

They want to make saints, and they make--" he stopped without ending his sentence.
Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father's "Adieu," or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home.

They pitied that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.
This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the two sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the hand of Nature.