story which seemed to me to suit the delicate beauty of the flower I had found in the wilderness, and read more like a chapter of some versified novelette, like 'Lucille,' than a _bonâ fide_ page out of the book of one's actual life, especially in a life like mine, of essentially material pleasures and emphatically substantial and palpable ambitions. But there _are_ odd stories in real life!--strange pathetic ones, too--stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims, and pungent egotisms, and we would fain cut them out; they have the ring of that Arcadia whose golden gates shut on us when we outgrew boyhood, and in which, _en revanche_, we have sworn ever since to disbelieve--keeping our word sometimes, perhaps to our own hindrance--Heaven knows! "I stayed as long as I could that evening, till the weather had cleared up so long, and the sun was shining again so indisputably, that I had no longer any excuse to linger in the dark-tapestried room, with the chestnuts sputtering among the wood-ashes, and Madame Cazot's needles clicking one continual refrain, and the soft gazelle eyes of my young châtelaine glancing from my sketches to me with that mixture of shyness and fearlessness, innocence and candor, which gave so great a charm to her manner. She was a new study to me, both for my palette and my mind--a pretty fresh toy to amuse me while I should stay in the Midi. I was not going to leave without making sure of a permission to return. I wanted to have that face among my pastels, and when I had thanked her for her shelter and her welcome, I told her my name, and asked her leave to come again where I had been so kindly received. "'Come again, monsieur? Certainly, if you care to come. But you will find it a long way from Luz, I fear,' she said, naïvely, looking up at me with her large clear fawn-like eyes--eyes so cloudless and untroubled _then_--as she let me take her hand, and bade me adieu et bonsoir. "I reassured her on that score, you can fancy, and left her standing in the deep-embrasured window, a great stag-hound at her feet, and the setting sun, all the brighter for its past eclipse, bathing her in light. I can always see her in memory as I saw her then, poor child!----Faugh! How hot the night is! Can't we get more air anyhow?