I shall never forget that dÉjeÛner, and the kindness of my guardian to poor Franzius. The tall footmen who served us may have wondered at this very unaccustomed guest; but had the Emperor been sitting in Franzius' place M. le Vicomte could not have laid himself out more to please. And from no hidden motive. Franzius was his guest, he had invited him to dÉjeÛner, he saw the Bohemian was ill at ease in his strange surroundings, and with exquisite delicacy only attainable by a man of good birth, trained in all the subtleties of life, he set himself the task of setting his guest at ease.

When the meal was over we went into the smoking-room; and then, and only then, did M. le Vicomte refer to the question of Eloise in a few well-chosen words.

Then he dismissed us as though we were schoolboys; and I took the musician off to see my apartments.

Now, I am Irish, or at least three parts Irish, and I suppose that accounts for some eccentricities in my conduct of affairs. I am sure that it accounts for the fact that my joy up to this had carried me along so irresistibly and so pleasantly that I had not once looked back.

It was when I opened the door of my sitting-room that memory, or perhaps conscience, woke up to deal my happiness a blow.

The man beside me knew nothing of Eloise's past. Or did he?

Never, I thought, as I looked at him. His happiness is new-born, it has been stained by no cloud. She has told him nothing.

I sat down and watched him as he roamed about the room, examining the works of art, the pictures, and the hundred-and-one things, pretty or quaint; costly toys for the grown-up.

I sat and watched him.

An overmastering impulse came upon me to go at once to Etiolles, see Eloise, and speak to her alone, if possible.

"Come," I said, "let us go down to the Pavilion. I want a breath of country air. Paris is smothering me. Shall we start?"

He went to the library to fetch his violin, and we left the house.

We took the train. It was a glorious September day; they were carting the corn at Evry; and the country, warm and mellow from the long, hot summer, was covered by the faintest haze, a gauze of heat that paled the horizon, making a diaphanous film from which the sky rose in a dome of perfect blue.

The little gardens by the way were filled with autumn flowers—stocks and hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies—simple and old-fashioned flowers, great bouquets with which God fills the hands of the poor, more beautiful than all the treasures of Parma and Bordighera.

A child of six, a son of one of the railway porters, bound also for Etiolles on a message, tramped with us. Franzius carried him on his shoulder part of the way, and bought him sweets at the village shop.

Eloise was not at the Pavilion. Madame Ancelot said she had taken her sewing and was in the sun-garden of the ChÂteau, and there we sought for her. This garden, small and protected from the east wind by a palisaded screen, was the prettiest place imaginable. It was at the back of the ChÂteau, and steps from it led up to the rose-garden. It had in its centre a square marble pond from which a Triton blew thin jets of water for ever at the sky.

Eloise was seated on a small grassy bank; her workbasket was beside her; and she was engaged in some needlework which she held in her lap.

She made a pretty picture against the hollyhocks which lined the bank; and prettier still she looked when, hearing our footsteps, she cast her work aside and ran to meet us.

With a swift glance at Franzius, she ran straight to me and took both my hands in hers.

"He has told you?" said she, looking up full and straight into my face, full and straight with perfect candour and firm eyes more liquid and beautiful than the blue of heaven washed by the early dawn.

"He has told me," I replied, holding her hands in mine.

All the sadness and pain that my past relationship with her had caused me was now banished, for I could read in her eyes, or, blind that I was, I thought I could read in her eyes, that the past was for her not in the new world in which she found herself.

We sat down on the little grassy bank, and talked things over, the three of us. Three people who had found a treasure could not have been more happily jubilant as we talked of the future.

"And you know," said I, "you will never want money. Franzius will be rich with his music; and even should he never care to write again, I have a large sum of money in trust for you. Oh, don't ask who gave it in trust for you both! It is there."

We talked till the dusk fell and star after star came out.

So dark was it when I left that a tiny point of light in Eloise's hair made me hold her head close to look. It was a glow-worm that had fallen from the bending hollyhocks.

It seemed to me like a little star that God had placed there as a portent of fortune and happiness.

When I got back to Paris my guardian was out.

I went to my rooms to think things over. My thoughts had received a new orientation. I remembered my delight that morning on finding myself free—free of all that heaven!

Ah, if I could only have loved her as Franzius did!

What, then, was this thing called Love, which I had never known, the thing which I had never guessed till to-day, till this evening, there in the sunk garden of Saluce, in the dusk so filled with the sound of unseen wings and the music of an unknown tongue?

Some drawing things were on the table.

I have always been a fair artist, and sketching has been one of my few amusements.

Almost mechanically I took a pencil, and tried to sketch the face of Eloise Feliciani.

But it was not the face of Eloise Feliciani that appeared on the paper. I gazed on it, when it was finished, in troubled amazement. It was the face of a woman—yet it was also the portrait of a child. Ah, yes; beyond any doubt of memory it was the face of Margaret von Lichtenberg, the old portrait in the gallery of Schloss Lichtenberg! Yet it was the face, also, of little Carl!