He passed the evening in the chimney-corner, before a fire made of dried grape-vines, for life in the engine-room had made him very chilly. As of old, when he returned from his country excursions with the doctor, the remembrance of his kindness and affection rendered him impervious to the slights he received at home, so now did the prospect of seeing Cécile people his solitude with dear phantoms and happy visions, that remained with him even while he slept. The next day he knocked at the Rivals’ door. “The doctor has not come in. Mademoiselle is in the office,” was the reply of the little servant who had replaced the faithful old woman he had known. Jack turned to the office; he knocked hurriedly, impatient to behold his former companion. “Come in, Jack,” said a sweet voice. Instead of obeying, he was seized with a strange emotion of fear. The door opened suddenly, and Jack asked himself if the charming apparition on the threshold, in her blue dress and clustering blonde hair, was not the sun itself. How intimidated he would have been had not the little hand slipped into his own recalled so many sweet recollections of their common child-hood! “Life has been very hard for you, my grandfather tells me,” she said. “I have had much sorrow, too. Dear grandmamma is dead; she loved you, and often spoke of you.” He sat opposite to her, looking at her. She was tall and graceful; as she stood leaning against the corner of an old bookcase, she bent her head slightly to talk to her friend, and reminded him of a bird. Jack remembered that his mother was beautiful also; but in Cécile there was something indefinable—an aroma of some divine spring-time, something fresh and pure, to which Charlotte’s mannerisms and graces bore little resemblance. Suddenly, while he sat in this ecstasy before her, he caught sight of his own hand. It seemed enormous to him; it was black and hardened, and the nails were broken and deformed,—irretrievably injured by contact with fire and iron. He was ashamed, but could not conceal them even by putting them in his pocket. But he saw himself now with the eyes of others, dressed in shabby clothes and an old vest of D’Argenton’s, that was too small for him and too short in the sleeves. In addition to this physical awkwardness, poor Jack was overwhelmed by the memory of all the disgraceful scenes through which he had passed. The drunken orgies, the hours of beastly intoxication, all returned to his recollection, and it seemed to him that Cécile knew them, too. The slight cloud that hung on her fair young brow, the compassion he read in her eyes, all told him that she understood his shame and humiliation. He wished to run away and shut himself into a room at Aulnettes, and never leave it again. Fortunately, some one came into the office, and Cécile, busy at her scales, writing the labels as her grandmother had done, gave Jack time to recover his equanimity.