He sat down beside her and their lips met. It was one of those kisses of supreme delight in which two lovers meeting after absence strive to impart, together with the tenderness of the present hour, all the unexpressed tendernesses of the hours that have been lost. A tap at the door separated them. "It is for your luggage," said Theresa, pushing her lover away with a gesture of regret; then, with a subtle smile: "Would you like to see your room? I have been here since yesterday evening; I hope that you will be pleased with everything. I thought so much of you in getting the little room ready." She drew him by the hand into an apartment which adjoined the drawing-room, and the window of which looked upon the garden of the hotel. The fire was lighted in the fireplace. Vases, gay with flowers, stood on the bracket and also on the table, over which Theresa, to give it a more homelike appearance, had spread a Japanese cloth which she had brought. On it she had placed three frames with those portraits of herself which the young man preferred. He turned to thank her, and he encountered one of those looks which make the heart quite faint, and with which an affectionate woman seems to thank him whom she loves for the pleasure which he has been pleased to receive from her. But the presence of the servant engaged in setting down and opening the portmanteau prevented him from replying to this look with a kiss. "You must be tired," she said; "while you are settling down I will go and tell them to get tea ready in the drawing-room. If you knew how sweet it is to me to wait on you----." "Go," he said, unable to find a phrase in reply, so completely was his soul possessed with happy emotion. "How I love her!" he added in a whisper, and to himself, as he watched her disappearing through the door with that figure and walk of a young girl which were still left her by her childless marriage; and he was obliged to sit down that he might not swoon before the evidence of his felicity. The human creature is naturally so organised for misfortune that there is something ravishing in the complete realisation of desire, like a sudden entry upon a miracle or a dream, and, at a certain degree of intensity, it seems as if the joy were not true. And then, was not the novelty of the situation bound to act like a sort of opium upon the brain of this child, who could not comprehend that his mistress had seized upon the circumstance to evade by this very strangeness the difficulties preliminary to a more complete surrender of her person?