Madame de Marignan laughed outright, and showed the loveliest little double row of pearls in all the world. "Admirable!" said she. "Quite an elegant compliment, and worthy of an accomplished lady-killer! _Allons_! you are a promising scholar." "In all that I have dared to say, Madame, I am, at least, sincere," I added, abashed by the kind of praise. "Sincere? Of course you are sincere. Who ever doubted it? Nay, to blush like that is enough to spoil the finest compliment in the world. There--it is three o'clock, and at half-past I have an engagement, for which I must now make my _toilette_. Come to-morrow evening to my box at the _Italiens_, and so adieu. Stay--being my _cavaliere_, I permit you, at parting, to kiss my hand." Trembling, breathless, scarcely daring to touch it with mine, I lifted the soft little hand to my lips, stammered something which was, no doubt, sufficiently foolish, and hurried away, as if I were treading on air and breathing sunshine. All the rest of that day went by in a kind of agreeable delirium. I walked about, almost without knowledge where I went. I talked, without exactly knowing what I said. I have some recollection of marching to and fro among the side-alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, which at that time was really a woody park, and not a pleasure-garden--of lying under a tree, and listening to the birds overhead, and indulging myself in some idiotic romance about love, and solitude, and Madame de Marignan--of wandering into a _restaurant_ somewhere about seven o'clock, and sitting down to a dinner for which I had no appetite--of going back, sometime during the evening, to the Rue Castellane, and walking to and fro on the opposite side of the way, looking up for ever so long at the darkened windows where my divinity did not show herself--of coming back to my lodgings, weary, dusty, and not a bit more sober, somewhere about eleven o'clock at night, driven to-bed by sheer fatigue, and, even then, too much in love to go to sleep!