CHAPTER IX.
ONE SWALLOW MAKES NO SUMMER.
Too many chaotic elements had collected together in the family of the Franks for one sun-gleam to dissipate.

Even the married pair did not clearly understand their own actions.
The Judge, truly, was too much enchanted by his former beloved one; and the beautiful Emelie did all that was in her power to enslave again her early adorer.
Judge Frank, who would have been as cold and proud as possible, if he had been assailed by coarse and direct flattery, was yet by no means steeled against the refined and almost imperceptible flattery of Emelie, who, with all her peculiar gifts of soul and understanding, made herself subordinate to him, in order to be enlightened and instructed by him.
"An extraordinarily amiable and interesting lady," thought he still with greater animation, although he seldom asserted so much; and exactly in the proportion in which he found Emelie interesting, it was natural that he should find Elise less so, especially as he found in Emelie precisely those very qualities, the want of which he had so much regretted in his wife; namely, an interest in his activity as a citizen, and in general for the objects connected with which he occupied himself in the liveliest manner.
Elise, on her part, was neither calm nor clear.

The connexion between her husband and Emelie was painful to her; and she felt a sort of consolation from the devotion of Jacobi, even when it was beginning to assume that passionate character which made her seriously uneasy.
A letter, which she wrote to her sister about this time, exhibits her state of feeling: "It is long since I wrote to you, Cecilia--I hardly know why; I hardly know, indeed, my own feelings--all is so unquiet, so undefined.

I wish it were clear! "Do you know she is very lovely, this 'old flame' of my husband's, and very brilliant.

I fancy I am jealous of her.