The moonlight and the presence of mademoiselle made the place a very paradise to me. We two were alone in the garden. The moon spread beauty over the broken walls of the chateau on one side, and the green vegetation around us leaving some places in mysterious shade. The sun-dial was all in light, and so was mademoiselle standing beside it. I breathed sweet wild odors from the garden. From some part of the chateau came the soft twang of the strings responding to the fingers of the gypsy, I held the soft hand of mademoiselle. I raised it to my lips. "I love you, I love you!" I whispered. She made no answer, only looked at me with a kind of mingled grief and joy, bliss embittered by despair. "It cannot be," I went on, "that Heaven would permit so great a love to find no response. Will you not answer me, mademoiselle?" "What answer would you have?" she asked, in a perturbed voice. "I would have love for love." Her answer was arrested by the sound of the gypsy's voice, which at that instant rose in an old song, that one in which a woman's love is likened to a light or a fire. These are the first words: "Bright as the sun, more quick to fade; Fickle as marsh-lights prove; Where brightest, casting deepest shade-- False flame of woman's love." "Heed the song, monsieur," said mademoiselle, in the tone of one who warns vaguely of a danger which dare not be disclosed openly. "It is an old, old song," I answered. "The raving of some misanthrope of bygone time." "It has truth in it," she said. "Nay, he judged all women from some bitter experience of his own. His song ought to have died with him, ought to be shut up in the grave wherein he lies, with his sins and his sorrows." "Though the man is dead, the truth he sang is not. Heed it, monsieur, as a warning from the dead to the living, a warning to all brave men who unwarily trust in women!" "I needed no song to warn me, mademoiselle," I said, thinking of Mlle. d'Arency and M. de Noyard. "I have in my own time seen something of the treachery of which some women are capable." "You have loved other women?" she said, quickly. "Once I thought I loved one, until I learned what she was." "What was she?" she asked, slowly, as if divining the answer, and dreading to hear it. "She was a tool of Catherine de Medici's," said I, speaking with all the more contempt when I compared the guileful court beauty, Mlle. d'Arency, with the pure, sweet woman before me; "one of those creatures whom Catherine called her Flying Squadron, and she betrayed a very honest gentleman to his death." "Betrayed him!" she repeated. "Yes, by a pretended love tryst." Mademoiselle trembled, and held out her hand to the dial for support.