"If I tell you so, what gage have I, Monsieur Léon, that, a few months gone by, you will even remember it? In those magnificent cities you will soon forget Lorraine; with the _grandes dames_ of the courts you will soon cease to care for Favette?" "Look in my eyes, Favette, they alone can answer you as I would answer! Till we meet again none shall supplant you for an hour, none rob you of one thought; you have my first love, you will have my last. Favette, you believe me?" "Yes--I believe!" murmured Favette, resting her large eyes fondly on him. "We will meet as we part, though you are the swallow, free to take flight over the seas to foreign lands, and I am the violet, that must stay where it is rooted in the Lorraine woods!" "Accept the augury," he whispered, resting his lips upon her low smooth brow. "Does not the swallow ever return to the violet, holding it fairer than all the gaudy tropical flowers that may have tempted him to rest on the wing and delay his homeward flight? Does not the violet ever welcome him the same, in its timid winning spring-tide loveliness, when he returns to, as when he quitted, the only home he loves? Believe the augury, Favette; we shall meet as we part!" And they believed the augury, as they believed in life, in love, in faith; they who were beginning all, and had proved none of the treacherous triad! What had he dreamed of in his solitary ancestral woods fairer than this Lorraine violet, that had grown up with him, side by side, since he, a boy of twelve, gathered heaths from the clefts of the rocks that the little child of six years old cried for and could not reach? What had she seen that she loved half so well as M. le Chevalier from the Castle, whom her uncle, the Curé, held as his dearest and most brilliant pupil, whose eyes always looked so lovingly into hers, and whose voice was always lavishing fond names on his petite Favette? They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of parting--sorrow that they had never known before--as they sat together in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts, among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook, till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs. II. THE SECOND MORNING. "Savez-vous que Favart va écrire une nouvelle comédie--La Chercheuse d'Esprit?" "Vraiment? Il doit bien écrire cela, car il s'occupe toujours à le _chercher_, et n'arrive jamais à le trouver!"