Yseulte de Valogne, waking the next morning and looking through the little panes of her high window in the roof at the landscape which the red leaves of the Canadian vine framed in crimson, was conscious of a new interest in her life. Some one, she did not know whom, for in her confusion she had not heard his name, had spoken to her with kindness, and that deference to her incipient womanhood which is the sweetest flattery to a very young girl. Othmar, with the grace of his manner, the seriousness and coldness which made him different to the men of his time, and his handsome features, to which an habitual reserve had given that expression of self-control and of melancholy which most attracts her sex, had seemed to her imagination like some gracious knight of old bending to pity her loneliness, and to succour that timidity which was in so much due to her pride and her unwillingness to be regarded with compassion and to her dread lest she should seem to seek attention.

She thought of him with a vague personal interest stronger than any she had felt in her simple and monotonous life, since her childhood on the Ile St. Louis had become to her like an old book of prayer, shut up unused, with the lavender and southern-wood of long dead summers faded and dried inside it. Though she was only sixteen, that childhood seemed so far, so very far, away. It would have appeared to Blanchette and Toinon, with their artificial, excited, blasÉ little lives, a dull and austere childhood enough, passed beside the infirmities and incapacities of age, and with no other active pleasure than to gather marguerites on the grass islands of the Seine or to hear a Magnificat sung at Notre Dame.

The rooms they lived in had been narrow and dark, their food had been of the simplest, their days regulated with exact and severe precision. But she had been so happy! When her grandmother, with the white hair like spun silk and the thin small hands, on which one great diamond sparkled—sole relic of a splendid past—said, with a smile, ‘C’est bien fait, mon enfant,’ all the universe could have added nothing to her content.

When the old man servant BÉnoÎt had taken her out to the Sainte Chapelle, or the graves at the Abbaye, and had told her tales of how her forefathers had died on the scaffold, in the noyades, on the battle-fields of Jemappes, or in the slaughter of Quiberon, she had known that purest of all pride, which rejoices in the honour and loyalty of the dead who have begotten us. All the air about her had been redolent of fidelity, of courage, of dignity. She had breathed in that fine clear atmosphere of integrity as the transparent dianthus drinks in the sea-water which the sunbeams pierce with vivifying gold. When the Marquise had sometimes taken, out of old sandal-wood coffers, antique brocades, dusky old jewels, faded yellow letters, perhaps a ribbon and a star of some extinct order once worn at Marly or at Amboise, the child had listened with reverent ear and beating heart to the stories which went with the relics and keepsakes, and it had always seemed to her as if some perfume of the past entered her very veins, as its fragrance is poured upwards from the root into the flower. Nor had it been always melancholy, that innocent, tranquil life; gentlemen of the old courtly habits had made their bow humbly in those narrow rooms, and the old gaietÉ gauloise had laughed sometimes beneath the sad serenity of losses nobly borne. There had been merry days when BÉnoÎt had taken her in one of the boats which crossed the Seine in summer, and had rowed to one of those quiet nooks of which he had the secret, and had landed with her amidst the tall hay grasses, and had set her noonday meal there—a little fruit and roll of bread—watching the poplars quiver in the light, and the women work upon the shore, and the clumsy brown brigs come and go on the broad breast of the river; and she had clasped a great sheaf of may and daisies and kingcups in her arms, and had run hither and thither in a very ecstasy of limbs set free and eyes delighted, and had cried her delight aloud to the old man, who had nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oui, oui, c’est beau,’ but had thought, with a pang at his faithful heart, ‘Si jeunesse savait——.’

Then, whilst she was still a young child, there had fallen across her life the darkness of the ‘annÉe terrible.’ The Marquise de Creusac had been at once too brave and too poor to quit Paris when the wall of iron and of fire had closed in around it. Her sons had died, one at the cavalry charge of FrÆschweiler, the other during the siege of Strasburg; she herself never rose from her bed during that ghastly winter, and her last breath left her lips as the Prussians entered Paris. The horror of that time could never wholly pass from the mind of Yseulte. BÉnoÎt had travelled with her to the chÂteau of Bois les Rois, and placed her under the roof of her only living relative, Aurore de Vannes, who herself was momentarily saddened and touched by the misfortunes of the country and the loss of many of her kinsmen, and in that chastened mood was kinder to the little friendless fugitive than she might have been at another and less desperate time.

All that time seemed very far away to Yseulte now; to earliest youth, a few years seems like the gap of a century.

BÉnoÎt was dead now, like the mistress he had adored and served, with that loyal service which, in this later time, one class has lost the power to inspire and the other class has lost the capacity to render; but those happy midsummer holidays on the islets of the Seine were always in her mind whenever she felt the touch of the fresh air or smelt the scent of growing leaves. They had spread a fragrance like that of summer all over her memories of childhood. She pitied Blanchette and Toinon, who cared nothing for daisies and kingcups; who tired so soon of their costly playthings; who knew their Trouville and Biarritz by heart, who, when they played at their games, were either peevish or bored, and who looked with all the scorn of fashionable eight-year-olders on a toilette which was a season out of date. Blanchette and Toinon would die without ever having been young; their cousin, who at sixteen was still entirely a child, had to die to the world before she had begun to live.

She leaned out of her window in the chill of the early morning, and she watched the sea mists curl up and drift away before the sun, the mountains come forth slowly from the clouds obscuring them, the light touch and reveal one by one the low white bastides, the grey olive yards, the bosquets of orange and lemon, the fields where the young corn already was spreading, the fantastic buildings which diversified and vulgarised the beauty of the scene, and the grey towers of S. Pharamond sober and severe amidst its ilex woods by contrast with the coquetteries and motley phantasies of its neighbours.

‘I wonder,’ she thought for the hundredth time, ‘if it were only because he pitied me that he talked to me?’

She went on wondering who he was, what he was; she did not even know that he owned S. Pharamond, and dared ask no one about him; all the gay, thoughtless, inquisitive questions which youth loves to put, whilst often too impatient to wait for an answer to them, had been too perpetually frozen on her lips for silence not to have become a second nature to her.

‘What you can observe is well,’ her grandmother had often said to her; ‘it is the wheat you have gleaned, and you have a right to it. But never gain knowledge by asking questions; it is the short cut across the fields which only trespassers take.’

At the convent any interrogations which she had been tempted to make had been repressed as too apposite to be convenient, and of the Duchesse de Vannes she would have no more have asked a question or a favour than she would have asked one of the lay figures on which the Duchesse’s marvellous costumes were built up, bit by bit, as idea succeeded to idea in the brains of great artists of the toilette.

She had scarcely heard a dozen sentences from Madame Aurore in the half-dozen years through which she had spent her summer vacations at their great castle in the Vosges, a lonely place where she had usually only the house-servants as companions; but in winter at Millo she had been always happy, for near Millo dwelt her foster-mother, a Savoyarde, who had become well-to-do since the time when, a poor young unwedded mother astray on the mercy of Paris, she had been glad to give her breast to the motherless child of the Comtesse de Valogne. Through the influence and aid of the Marquise de Creusac the woman Nicole had ultimately married her lover, a sturdy peasant of the environs of Nice, and by thrift and hard work and good luck and good husbandry combined, they now owned a bastide and an orange-orchard, and could receive ‘la petite Comtesse’ with honey and cream and conserves of their own manufactures. They had no children, and Mlle. de Valogne still filled in the heart of her foster-mother the place which had been empty and cold when a month-old baby had gasped out its last breath of feeble life in a Paris hospital sixteen years before.

‘What is the good of it all, the pÉtiot is dead and gone?’ said Nicole Sandroz many a time, looking over her hives and hen-houses, her rose-beds and her green peas, all blooming for the Paris market. But this mood was transient; the pÉtiot was not to be recalled by regret, and the solid delight of early vegetables and their value remained to her. She was a good woman, though hard in some ways and greedy; but she was the only creature who gave Yseulte de Valogne anything of the comfort of human affection and tender, blind, unreasoning admiration. To Nicole ‘mon enfant la Comtesse’ was an object of honest adoration, to be waited on, worshipped, petted, slaved for if need be; and this wholly sincere, if clumsy, devotion had always been to the starved heart of the girl as the one scrap of moss on the frozen sea and shore is to the lonely and lost voyager.

When the dark, hard-featured face of the NiÇoise presented itself at the convent gates of FaÏel, and with her load of oranges or strawberries, of camellias or roses, she came out of the hot sun into the quietness and dusk of the parloir and stretched out her big sturdy arms to her nursling, the proud eyes of Yseulte filled with tears as no one else ever saw them do. She was a little child once more clinging to her nurse’s skirts in the old panelled rooms in the Ile St. Louis.

The low white walls of the bastide were set upon a hill-side not half-an-hour’s walk from Millo, a fragrant, pleasant, homely place, with violets cultured like corn, and roses grown like currant-bushes, for the flower-shops of Paris and the purchase of the foreigners in Nice. The mere presence of Nicole made her visits to the southern shore longed for and enjoyed, and compensated to her for the fretful teazing of her little cousins, the ill-concealed enmity of their governesses, the perpetual sense of being undesired by any one there, and the many slights which the indifference of her hosts made them careless of inflicting. Aurore de Vannes would have said, if remonstrated with, that the girl could want for nothing. She had two pretty rooms all to herself, and a piano in one of them; had as many gowns as she could wear, though, of course, at her age they were the frocks of a pensionnaire; and could pass her time in the schoolroom or in the gardens very much at her pleasure; she could even drive out in the basket-carriage if Blanchette and Toinon did not want it. The existence must, she would have argued, at any rate be very much livelier than the convent.

In the first winter she had passed at Millo no one had come there but herself, and she had spent her time almost wholly with her foster-mother; later on, when the house was full—as it was now—she obtained in her holidays a large amount of liberty, from the fact that it was no one’s especial duty to look after her. She used her freedom innocently enough, and always took the path under the olives which led to the flower-farm of the Sandroz.

Once the Duchesse had said to her irritably, ‘What charm do you find in peasants grubbing among peastalks and growing salad?’ But she had not waited for an answer, which was fortunate, as Yseulte would have been too shy to give the true one,—that they loved her a little.

The Duchesse concluded that the governesses of her children did their duty in attending on her young cousin. The governesses, however, were willing that one who was only an extra charge to them should do as she chose so long as she brought no trouble on themselves; few mornings passed without her finding her way to the welcome of her old nurse, to sit at pleasure under the shadow of the orange leaves, or drift through clear water in the big market boat.

Madame de Vannes was, as the world in general would have said, very generous to her; her education was of the best, the clothes provided for her were elegant and suitable, her linen was of the finest, her boots and shoes were the prettiest possible; the Duchesse did everything well that she did at all; but beyond a remark that her hair was too low or too high on her forehead, or that she did not wear the right gloves with the right frock, Yseulte could scarcely recall twenty phrases that she had heard from her august cousin. Now and then the heart of the girl had risen in an impulse of ardour towards liberty, towards independence. She was conscious of more talent than the manner of her education had developed; in a vague way she sometimes fancied the world might hold some place for her, some freedom of effort or attainment; but all the habits of obedience made a cage for her as surely as the laws made one. Her grandmother had written with a hand half paralysed by death to commend her to the care of her relative, and amongst her dying words the command: ‘Obey Aurore as you have obeyed me,’ had been often repeated. Any thought of rebellion was stifled by her sense of duty as soon as it arose.

This morning, as she leaned out of her window she could see the white house of the Sandroz, half a league away, amongst the olive foliage, and what was still more to her, the tiny bell tower of a little whitewashed church, the parish church of S. Pharamond, in whose parish Millo also lay. The one cracked bell sounding feebly for matins recalled her to the present hour, and reminded her that the morrow was the feast day of S. Cecilia to whom the building was dedicated.

‘He will be so vexed if the altar be not dressed,’ she thought. The old priest of Millo was accustomed to look to her for that service. The Duchesse always gave him two thousand francs in gold for his poor at New Year, but there her heed of her vicar ended. Yseulte, who had no gold to give, brought him flowers and boughs for his little, dusky, lonely place, where only a few fishermen and peasants ever knelt, and she sometimes sang at his Offices.

When she remembered the day, she wasted no more time at the window; she drank the cup of milk and ate the roll which the maid appointed to her service brought, and putting on a little hat of fur, went out through the house where even Blanchette and Toinon were still asleep, and only a few of the under servants were stirring.

It was cold, but already grown bright, with sunshine, and the promise of a warm noonday.

The gardens of Millo, with their autumn luxuriance still prolonged, were sparkling with sunbeams and dew-drops; their aloes and cacti pierced with broad sword-blades the blue clear air; the latest roses kissed the earliest camellias; the pink, the amber, the white, the purple, of groves of chrysanthemums, glowed in the parterres; but she did not dare to give them even a glance. No one ever plucked a flower there.

She went quickly through the alleys, and avenues, over the lawns, and under the berceaux, and after walking about a mile came to where the boundary of Millo was fixed by a high wall of closely-clipped arbutus, and only the small iron gate which Othmar had unlocked the previous night gave access to the lands of S. Pharamond, which lay beyond.

‘There will be sure to be something here,’ she thought, as she turned the latch of the gate which he had unthinkingly left open, and passed through the aperture into the thick ilex wood on the other side of the bearberry wall. She was not surprised to find it open, for the gardeners of the two houses often held communication; and she had been constantly permitted by those of S. Pharamond to wander about its grounds and pluck its commoner plants. It was a thing she had done a hundred times in the winters she had passed at Millo.

There were all kinds of plants growing up at Nicole’s bastide; but as she had no money to pay, the child had always felt a delicacy in asking, for them. Her foster-mother would indeed have refused her nothing; but to take as a gift the late-come quatre-saisons rose, or the early-blooming clochettes, which the Sandroz could sell so highly by sending them away in little air-tight tin boxes to Paris, would have appeared to the generous temper of the last of the Valognes a very ungenerous act.

Othmar, who had slept ill, rose early that day. When he had bathed and dressed, he strolled out on to his terrace, where Nadine Napraxine had eaten her strawberries. Though winter, the morning was mild, the sunrise glorious. Through the great gloom of his ilex groves he could see the sparkle of blue waves. It was not the scenery he cared most for; he liked the great windy shadowy plains of eastern Europe, the snow of mountains more sombre and severe than these hyacinth-hued maritime Alps, the gigantic grey walls of Atlantic rollers breaking on rugged rocks of Spain, or Britanny, or Scotland; but he was not insensible to the present beauty which surrounded him, if it were brighter and paler of hue, gayer of tone, softer in character, than the scenes he preferred.

He stood and looked idly, and thinking, ‘If I were wise I should go to Paris this morning.’

What was the use of letting all his years languish and drift aimlessly away for sake of a woman who made sport of his pain? Yonder, hidden by the curve of a distant cliff, was La Jacquemerille, and its mistress of the moment was, no doubt, sleeping soundly enough amongst the lace and cambric and satin of her bed, and would not have lain awake one moment thinking of him, though he had thought of her all night.

‘Were people ever sleepless for love?’ she had said once, with her pretty cynical smile. ‘That must have been very long ago, before the chemists had given us chloral!’

As he stood and thus made his picture of her in his mind sleeping, as the narcissus which she resembled sleeps in the moonlight, he saw a figure underneath the ilex boughs which was not hers, but had a grace of its own, though wholly unlike her.

It was the figure of a girl in a grey close dress which defined the outline of her tall slim limbs. She wore a fur hat, and had some fur about her shoulders; the sunbeams of the early day touched the gold in her hair and shone in her hazel eyes. She was gathering now one datura, now another, of those spared by the December mistral, and coming up to a bed of camellias, paused doubtfully before their blossoms; she came there like one accustomed to the place, and who merely did what she had often done before. Her grey gown, her sunny hair under its crown of sable, her hands filled with flowers, made a picture underneath the palms, amidst the statues, against the ilex darkness.

He recognised the child whom he had last seen in her white gown with the black sash a few hours before in the Duchesse’s drawing-rooms.

For the moment, he put on her appearance there that construction which a man, subject from his boyhood to the advances and solicitations of the other sex, was most apt to conceive of such an unsought visit. But as he saw how unconcerned, natural, and childlike her movements were as she paused, now by this shrub and now by that, or sat down on a bench to arrange some asters in her basket, he as rapidly discarded his suspicions and guessed the truth, that she had been ignorant of who he was the previous evening, and had come to his gardens by chance or by custom.

As he hesitated whether to descend and make her welcome, or to retreat unseen into the house and tell his servants to say nothing, she looked up and saw him. She dropped her flowers on the grass, and turned to run away like any startled nymph in classic verse, but he was too quick for her; he had descended the few steps from his terrace and had approached her before she could fly from him.

‘Do not be so unkind to me,’ he said, with deference and courtesy, for he divined how ashamed she was to have been found there. ‘There is little in these gardens after being swept by the mistral, which is a cruel horticulturist, but the hothouses, I hope, may give you something worthier your acceptance.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ she murmured, ‘there has been no one here so long——’

He had spoken as though her presence was the most natural thing in the world, but neither his composed acceptance of it or his courteous welcome could reconcile her to the position she occupied. She coloured painfully, and her breath came and went in an agitation she could not subdue.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she stammered again; ‘I did not know—last night I did not hear your name—there has been no one here so long. Oh, what can you think of me!’

Her eyes were filled with sudden tears; her colour faded as suddenly as it had come. She was only a child, and had been reared by stern formalities and by chill precepts.

‘Think?’ echoed Othmar; ‘that you are kind enough to treat me as a neighbour. Neighbours are not always friends, but I hope we shall be so. That little gate has no use in it unless it be an open portal for friendship to pass to and fro; I walked through it to Millo last night.’

But his good nature and gentleness could not avail to console her for what was in her own eyes, as it would have been in that of her relatives, an unpardonable and infamous misdemeanour. Now that she recognised in the speaker the same person whom her cousin had presented to her the previous evening, she longed for the lawn she stood on to open and cover her. A piteous dismay took possession of her; would he ever believe that she had not known him as the owner of S. Pharamond? Would he ever believe that S. Pharamond had been that morning, as far as her knowledge had gone, still unoccupied as it had been for ten mortal years?

All the lessons of her convent life made her act appear in her own eyes one of inexcusable audacity, unspeakable horror,—to have come into the gardens of a stranger when he was himself there to take his flowers!

The kindness of his gaze and the cordiality of his welcome could do nothing to console her; she was barely conscious of them; the colour in her face mounted to the loose curls escaping from her little fur cap; she laid her basket down and joined her hands in an unconscious supplication.

‘There has been no one here so long,’ she said yet again with pathetic appeal in her voice. ‘I thought I did no harm; M. Duvelleroy, the head gardener, has always let me come when there is a feast day. Indeed, I have never taken the rare flowers, only those which he did not want. It is the parish church of S. Pharamond, too; I did not know I did wrong—pray do not blame the gardeners.’

‘Blame them, when I am so much their debtor! I wish you would believe that you are the queen of all the gardens here. Why, even still you are hesitating to pluck the camellias!’

‘Because they told me never to touch them; I only looked at them; I think M. Duvelleroy sends them to Nice to sell. Indeed—indeed—I have never taken but what he told me I might have.’

What seemed so very terrible to her was that she must appear to the owner of S. Pharamond as a thief of his flowers! A vague idea flashed across her mind, that perhaps she might pay for the value of them—but then she had no money! The old jewels of her mother were to be hers, indeed; but when? She had not even seen them since her grandmother had died; perhaps they were to be sold to defray the cost of her entrance into convent life; she did not know. The great trouble of her spirit was reflected in her face, which was full of conflicting emotions; her mouth, which had been too silent the night before, trembled a little; the tears gleamed under her long lashes. Othmar thought her much more interesting with all this expression breaking up from under the mask of white marble which the convent had made her wear. In her bewilderment she became altogether a child; and the stately quiet of her manner fell away from her like an embroidered ermine-lined robe too heavy for her years.

‘Do they sell my camellias—the rogues?’ he said with a smile. ‘Of course you shall go away if you will, but not empty-handed. There must be something better worth having than those frost-bitten roses.’

He called a man who was sweeping up leaves on a lawn here.

‘Go and tell your chief to cut his finest orchids and bring them in a basket to me himself: any other rare thing he may have in the houses he can cut also. Mademoiselle,’ he said, turning to the girl, ‘you must not go back to Millo with such a poor opinion of my gardens. Is the Duchesse well? You remember that I had the honour to be presented to you by her last evening?’

‘You are Count Othmar?’

‘Men call me so,’ he replied, for he never loved that title which seemed to him so contemptible a thing, given, as it had been, in the beginning of the century by the first Emperor. ‘I am happy to be the owner of S. Pharamond, since you deign to visit it. You are at Millo every winter, I think?’

‘I am; they are not,’ she said, regaining her composure a little. ‘I did not hear your name last night. I thought you were some gentleman from Paris.’

‘I live oftenest in Paris,’ he replied, ‘but at the present moment I come from Central Asia. I am a friend of Monsignore Melville, as I told you; and I hope you will believe me when I say that, if only for his regard for you, you would be welcome at S. Pharamond.’

He spoke without compliment, seeing that any compliment would only scare her more.

‘You help my parish church, did you say?’ he continued. ‘It is very disgraceful of me never to have known it; we will get Melville to come and preach there. Does the curÉ want for anything?—is there nothing I could do?’

‘He wants a new soutane very much,’ she said with hesitation.

‘Then a new soutane he shall have before the world is a week older,’ said Othmar. ‘Why will you go away? Are you too afraid of me to venture into the house? Would you not have some cream, some cakes, some strawberries? What do young Graces like you live upon? Command anything you will.’

‘I have had some bread and milk; I want nothing; you are very kind.’

‘If you think me so, you must not treat me so distantly. You must make me a friend of yours. The Duchesse herself presented me last night. You seem determined to forget that.’

She stood inclined to go away, unwilling to seem ungrateful, yet afraid to remain; a charming picture of confusion and indecision, mingled with a gravity and a grace beyond her years. The Greuze face which he had seen in the boat bore the full force of the morning light as a rose bears it, the pure tints only deepened and illumined by it. Under the straight simple lines of the grey stuff gown the budding beauties of a still childish form could be divined; in her embarrassment her colour still came and went; her large eyes, of a golden hazel, were almost black from the shadow of their lashes. So far as a man whose heart and senses are engrossed by one woman can be alive to the loveliness of another, Othmar was sensible of this youthful and poetic beauty, which seemed to belong to the first fresh hours of the morning, and to be born of it as the rosebuds were.

‘I hope you will not be angry,’ she said anxiously. ‘It was my fault. At Millo no one must touch a single flower, and the curÉ likes to see the altar pretty, and so one day—oh, that is quite a long time ago, three winters ago—I happened to see the gate open into these grounds, and I asked M. Henri if I might gather what he did not care to sell, and he said that I was welcome always to the common flowers. You will not blame him, if you please, for it was altogether my fault.’

She had seldom made a speech so long in her life, and she paused, ashamed of the sound of her voice in the quiet of the morning air. She feared also that she was doing wrong to speak at all to this stranger, all owner of S. Pharamond though he might be.

‘All that I am inclined to blame him for,’ answered Othmar, ‘is for having laid any restrictions upon you; he has no right to sell even a sprig of mignonette. These gardens are not kept for profit; they can have no happier use than to contribute to your pleasure and to the altars of the church. Pray, do not go; wait a moment for this criminal to bring us the orchids.’

But she only grew more alarmed at her own intrusion there. The easy, kindly gallantry of his manner scarcely reassured her; she was but a child, and a child reared in formal and severe codes. She doubted that she was guilty of some grave offence in standing under a palm-tree beside a group of camellias with a person whom she had scarcely seen before. She had neither the habits of the world nor the conventional badinage which could have met his courtesy on its own ground and replied to it in a few careless phrases. But it seemed to him that her silence was golden, as golden as the gleams in her changeful hazel eyes as the sun smote on them.

‘If you would allow me to go,’ she murmured, ‘I have quite enough flowers here. It is such a small church, and the orchids would be much too rare——’

‘If the orchids were made of rubies and pearls, what happier fate could they ask than to fall from your hands on to the altars of the Madonna?’ said Othmar, as he broke off the blossoms of his camellias with no sparing hand.

At that moment the head-gardener, alarmed and disturbed at the message which he had received from his master, came in sight with a basket hurriedly filled with some of the choicest treasures of his forcing-houses.

Othmar took it from him:

‘You did quite right,’ he said in a low tone, ‘to make my friends welcome to the gardens in my absence, but another time, M. Duvelleroy, make them welcome to the best; do not reserve it for the markets and the florist shops of Nice.’

The man, guilty, and taken at a disadvantage, had no time to prepare a lie; he grew red, and stammered, and was thankful for his master’s gesture of dismissal as Othmar turned from him impatiently and offered the orchids to the girl.

‘You are angry with him,’ she said, anxiety conquering her timidity.

‘Not so; I am grateful to him,’ said Othmar. ‘But I shall, perhaps, be angry with my house-steward, whose duty it is to keep these rogues clean-handed. If he had given you his best flowers I would have pensioned him for life, but to limit you to taking what he did not want to sell, was to disgrace S. Pharamond.’

‘Indeed, he has been very kind all these three winters,’ she murmured, in infinite distress at the thought that she had inadvertently injured the man in his master’s opinion.

‘He shall wear the order of St. Fiacre if you like, if there be such an order to reward good gardeners,’ said Othmar gaily, seeing her genuine anxiety on the man’s behalf. ‘I may come and see your decorations to-morrow. Shall I send you a load of flowers? That would be better I think.’

She looked alarmed.

‘Oh no; oh pray, do not!’ she said with earnestness. ‘You are very kind to think of it, Monsieur, but it would frighten the curÉ, and we should not know what to do with so many, the church is so very small——’

She hesitated a moment, the colour in her cheeks grew warm as she added:

‘My cousin does not know that I come here. I do not mean that it is any secret, but she might think it wrong, intrusive, impertinent——’

‘She could think nothing of the sort,’ said Othmar. ‘They are three words which no one could associate with Mdlle. de Valogne; I am delighted my deserted house could be so honoured. Must you go? I shall not easily forgive myself if I frighten you away. Let me come with you to the gate at least.’

He walked beside her under the palms and on the shaven grass down an aisle of clipped arbutus, carrying for her the camellias, white and rose, which he had broken off their plants with no care for the appearance of the group to which they belonged.

She was silent; she was subdued by an unwonted sense of wrong-doing; she fancied that she had committed some terrible indiscretion; but how was she to have known that he was there, when for three winters the camellias had blossomed unseen in those silent evergreen ways, which no step but a gardener’s had ever disturbed, and where she had come to watch the blackbirds trip over the fallen leaves, and the fountains dance in the sunshine, and the tea-roses shower petals of cream and of gold on the terraces, with no more thought or hesitation than she had gone to the olive-yards of Nicole Sandros? Her confusion had nothing of awkwardness. It was very graceful, almost stately, in its silence; it was the grave innocence, the startled hesitation, of the young nymph surprised in the sanctuary of the grove.

She accepted the orchids with a serious gratitude, which seemed to him quite out of proportion to the slenderness of the gift; but when he said as much she interrupted him:

‘They are so beautiful,’ she said earnestly. ‘It seems cruel to have plucked them. One fancies they will take wing like the butterflies.’

‘You are very fond of flowers?’

‘Oh yes—and people waste them so. At my cousin’s ball last week there were five thousand roses. I saw them in the morning; they were quite dead.’

‘Did you not see them at night?’

‘At night, no; how could I? I am not in the world; I never shall be. Sometimes they tell me to be an hour in the reception-rooms after dinner; that is all; I do not care for it.’

‘But do you not wish for the time of balls to come? Every young girl does.’

‘I try never to think about it,’ she said simply. ‘I know it will never come for me.’

There was a resignation in her words which was more pathetic than any regrets.

Then with the colour hot in her cheeks again, remembering that she was speaking too much to a stranger, she opened the little gate in the arbutus walk which led into the grounds of Millo. ‘I thank you very much,’ she murmured. ‘I assure you I will never come again.’

‘And unless you come again, I assure you that you will tell me tacitly that I have had the misfortune to displease you,’ said Othmar, as he held open the gate, and bowed low to her; he saw that it would be only unkindness to detain her or to accompany her. She was as uneasy as a bird which has flown by mistake into a conservatory.

‘I will come to the church to-morrow,’ he added. ‘Do you not sing there sometimes?’

‘Now and then. There is no one else to sing. But my cousin does not approve of it. She thinks there may be people over from Nice; but there never are. There is no one but the peasants.’

‘The Duchesse will not mind me,’ said Othmar. ‘Let us say au revoir!’

He kissed her hand with a careless gallantry which made her colour over her brow and throat, and let her leave him. She sped like a frightened fawn over the turf and was soon lost to sight in the bosquets of Millo.

Othmar strolled back to the house.

‘Au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure,’

he repeated to himself as he looked after her; the pathos of her destiny gave her a spirituality and a sanctity in his sight, and the song of the blind child and its young singer for a few moments disputed a place in his memory with the vision of Nadine Napraxine as she had plucked the tea-roses on his terrace to let them fall.

‘That young girl would not let a rose fade,’ he thought, ‘and her own roses are to wither between convent walls! What arbitrary caprices has Fate! If they would only let me give her a million——’

But they would not even have let him give her orchids and camellias had they known it.