And I did not love her at all. Nor did she love me. It was just as though the great tide of Nature had seized us, innocently floating, and flung us together, drifted us together for a little while, and then let us part; for we never referred to the matter again after that day.

But a cloud had arisen on my horizon, a cloud no larger than Eloise's hand.

I installed Franzius at Fauchard's cottage.

He brought his luggage with him, done up in a brown-paper parcel, under his right arm; under his left he carried his violin. I will never forget him that afternoon as he stepped from the train at Evry station, where Eloise and I were waiting to receive him. Such a Bohemian, bringing the very pavement of Paris with him, the music of Mirlitons, the gaslight of the Rue Coquenard, and the sawdust of La Closerie de Lilas.

Unhappy man! Paris had marked him for her own. Heaven itself could never entirely remove from his exterior the stains and the scorching, the lines around his eyes drawn during the early hours in dancing hall and cafÉ, the bruised look that poverty, hunger, and cold impress upon the servants who wait upon the Muses—the lower servants, whose place is the courtyard! But the stains and the scorching had not reached his soul; like Shadrach he had passed through the burning fiery furnace and come out a living man.

Besides his luggage and his violin he was carrying some rolls of music-paper.

We walked to the Pavilion, and from there through the woods to Fauchard's cottage. The bees were working in the little garden, and the pearl-white pigeons were drawn up in parade order on the roof as if to receive us. Never seemed so loud the shouting and laughter of the birds, never so beautiful the rambler roses round the porch! The humble things of Nature seemed to have put themselves en fÊte to welcome back their own.

I did not go to Etiolles for some days after this. A new era of my life had begun.

And now it was that the truth of the Vicomte's philosophy was borne in upon me:

"You are getting yourself into a position from which you cannot escape with honour. You cannot marry Mademoiselle Feliciani, for Paris would not receive her as your wife."

What was I to do with her? Of course, a man of the world would have answered the question promptly; but I was not a man of the world. And the summer went on; and I was taken about to balls and fÊtes by my guardian, and as I was young, not bad-looking, and wealthy, I was well received.

The summer went on, the cuckoos hoarsened in the forest of SÉnart, the splendour of Nature deepened, the corn in the fields at Evry was tall and yellow, the grapes in the vineyards full-globed, and the dragon-flies had attained the zenith of their magnificence, and all day mirrored themselves in the moat of the Pavilion. Franzius, lost in his music and in the paradise in which he found himself, had got back years of his youth. His genius, clipped and held back, had suddenly burst into bloom. He was projecting and carrying out a great work—an opera founded on an old German legend. Carvalho had inspected some of the scores, and had become enthusiastic. All was well with Franzius, but not with Eloise. As the summer went on she seemed to droop.

At first I thought it was only my fancy, but by the end of July I was certain.

Franzius was a frequent visitor at the Pavilion. When he was there with us she seemed bright and gay, but when we found ourselves alone she grew abstracted and sad. Her cheeks had lost colour, and Madame Ancelot declared that she did not eat. The meaning of all this was plain—at least, I thought so. She cared for me.

This thought, which would have given a lover joy, filled me with deep sadness. I had offered and given the girl my protection, Heaven knows, from the highest motives. And now behold the imbroglio! If she cared for me, it was my duty to marry her and give her a future. If I married her, society would not receive her as my wife. I had, in fact, in trying to make her future happy, gone a long way towards ruining my own. Heaven knows, if I had loved her, little I would have cared for society; but the mischief and the misery of the thing was just that—I did not love her.

I felt a repulsion towards her whenever the idea of love came into my mind, with her image. It was as if a man, who, tasting a fruit in a sudden fit of hunger and finding it nauseous and insipid, were suddenly condemned to eat of that fruit for ever after, and none other.

And I had the whole of life before me, and I would be tied to a woman all through life—to a woman I did not love! And the worst part of the whole business was the fact that I could get out of the whole thing as easily as a man steps out of a cab—as easily as a man crushes a flower. And that was what bound me.

To stay in the affair, to be made party to my own social ruin, was the most difficult business on earth.

Days of argument I spent with myself. The two terrible logicians that live in every man's brain fought it out; there was no escaping from the conclusion: "If you have made this girl love you, you must ask her to be your wife, for under the guise of a brother's friendship you have treated her just as any of these Boulevard sots and fools would have treated her. Oh, don't talk of Nature and sudden impulse—that is just the argument they would use! You did this thing unpremeditatedly, we will admit. Well, you have your whole life to meditate over the reparation and to make it. Faults of this description are ugly toys made by the devil, and they have to be paid for with either your happiness or your soul. Of course, you can treat her as your mistress; and she, poor child, tossed already about and bruised by the waves of chance, would be content. But would you? Would you be content to thrust still deeper in the mud of life this creature that fate has thrown on your hands? The powers of darkness have surely conspired against this unfortunate being. She, a daughter of the Felicianis, has been dragged in the mire of Paris. Would you be on the side of darkness too?"

That was what my heart said against all the arguments of my head. And so it remained.

"To-morrow," said I, "I will go to Etiolles, and I will ask Eloise to be my wife."

That afternoon, walking in the Rue de Rivoli, I saw Franzius—Franzius, whom I imagined to be at Fauchard's cottage, green leagues away from Paris! He was walking rapidly. I had to run to catch him up; and when he turned his face I saw that he was in trouble. He was without his violin.

"Why, Franzius," I cried, "what are you doing here, and what ails you? Have you lost your violin?"

"Oh, my friend!" said Franzius. "What ails me? I am in trouble. No, I have not lost my violin, I have forgotten it—it has ceased to be, for me. Ah, yes, there is no more music in life! The birds have ceased singing, the blue sky has gone—Germany calls me back."

"Good heavens!" I said. "What's the matter? You haven't left Etiolles for good, have you?"

"Oh, no! I am going back for a few days. I came to Paris to-day to seek relief—to hear the streets—to forget——"

"To forget what? Come, tell me what has happened."

"Not now," said Franzius. "I cannot tell you now. To-morrow I will call on you at your house in the Place VendÔme. Then I will tell you."

That was all I could get from him; and off he went, having first wrung both my hands, the tears running down his face so that the passers-by turned to look and wonder at him.

"Come early to-morrow," I called out after him as he went. Then I pursued my way home to the Place VendÔme, wondering at the meaning of what I had seen and troubled at heart.