till she had assured herself that there was nothing left, and then she gazed at Philip with vacant eyes; there was no thought, no gratitude in their clear depths. Then she would play with him. She tried to take off his boots to see his foot; she tore his gloves to shreds, and put on his hat; and she would let him pass his hands through her hair, and take her in his arms, and submit passively to his passionate kisses, and at last, if he shed tears, she would gaze silently at him. She quite understood the signal when he whistled _Partant pour la Syrie_, but he could never succeed in inducing her to pronounce her own name--_Stephanie_. Philip persevered in his heart-rending task, sustained by a hope that never left him. If on some bright autumn morning he saw her sitting quietly on a bench under a poplar tree, grown brown now as the season wore, the unhappy lover would lie at her feet and gaze into her eyes as long as she would let him gaze, hoping that some spark of intelligence might gleam from them. At times he lent himself to an illusion; he would imagine that he saw the hard, changeless light in them falter, that there was a new life and softness in them, and he would cry, “Stephanie! oh, Stephanie! you hear me, you see me, do you not?” But for her the sound of his voice was like any other sound, the stirring of the wind in the trees, or the lowing of the cow on which she scrambled; and the colonel wrung his hands in a despair that lost none of its bitterness; nay, time and these vain efforts only added to his anguish. One evening, under the quiet sky, in the midst of the silence and peace of the forest hermitage, M. Fanjat saw from a distance that the Baron was busy loading a pistol, and knew that the lover had given up all hope. The blood surged to the old doctor’s heart; and if he overcame the dizzy sensation that seized on him, it was because he would rather see his niece live with a disordered brain than lose her for ever. He hurried to the place. “What are you doing?” he cried. “That is for me,” the colonel answered, pointing to a loaded pistol on the bench, “and this is for her!” he added, as he rammed down the wad into the pistol that he held in his hands. The Countess lay stretched out on the ground, playing with the balls. “Then you do not know that last night, as she slept, she murmured ‘Philip?’” said the doctor quietly, dissembling his alarm. “She called my name?” cried the Baron, letting his weapon fall. Stephanie picked it up, but he snatched it out of her hands, caught the other pistol from the bench, and fled.