CHAPTER VI "When I think about love," she began presently, in a soft dreamy voice--"I'm quite sure that very few people ever really feel it or understand it. It must be the rarest thing in all the world! This poor Sieur Amadis, asleep so long in his grave, was a true lover,--and I will tell you how I know he had said good-bye to love when he married. All those books we found in the old dower-chest, that day when we were playing about together as children, belonged to him--some are his own compositions, written by his own hand,--the others, as you know, are printed books which must have been difficult to get in his day, and are now, I suppose, quite out of date and almost unknown. I have read them all!--my head is a little library full of odd volumes! But there is one--a manuscript book--which I never tire of reading,--it is a sort of journal in which the Sieur Amadis wrote down many of his own feelings--sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse--and by following them carefully and piecing them together, it is quite easy to find out his sadness and secret--how he loved once and never loved again--" "You can't tell that," interrupted Robin--"men often say they can only love once--but they love ever so many times--" She smiled--and her eyes showed him what a stupid blunder he had made. "Do they?" she queried, softly--"I am so glad, Robin! For you will find it easy then to love somebody else instead of me!" He flushed, vexedly. "I didn't mean that--" he began. "No? I think you did!--but of course if you had thought twice you wouldn't have said it! It was uttered quite truly and naturally, Robin!--don't regret it! Only I want to explain to you that the Sieur Amadis was not like that--he loved just once--and the lady he loved must have been a very beautiful woman who had plenty of admirers and did not care for him at all. All he writes proves that. He is always grieved to the heart about it. Still he loved her--and he seems glad to have loved her, though it was all no use. And he kept a little chronicle of his dreams and fancies--all that he felt and thought about,--it is beautifully and tenderly written all in quaint old French. I had some trouble to make it out--but I did at last--every word--and when he made up his mind to marry, he finished the little book and never wrote another word in it. Shall I tell you what were the last lines he wrote?" "It wouldn't be any use," he answered, kissing again the hand he held--"I don't understand French. I've never even tried to learn it." She laughed.