Nevertheless--therefore, rather--his soul acknowledged the opposite to disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise. Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and, at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old sun-baked town. Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness. He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure--a woman’s--flitting before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming, her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk. “Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!” “Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know the way to Méricourt, monsieur.” He felt some wonder over her tone. “Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten me?” She did not answer or raise her face. “Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its horrors, Théroigne.” At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And this--white, fallen, and desolate--the face of a haunted creature! “What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?” “Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!--you come from Paris. And did you see there----” She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist. “What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied--the reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of so much republican virtue.” She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume. “He? Who?” said he.