Marguerite twisted a bit of grass around the little tuft of blossoms she had arranged, and held it up timidly. “Does it please you?” she said, with a glance of lovelight breaking through all her timidity. No one on earth could have resisted that look. Before he was aware of it, this young man had the blossoms in his hand, and was smiling down upon the sweet face, turned with such childlike appeal to his. “I think you are good and honest,” he said, speaking his thoughts aloud. “_You_ should not doubt me,” answered the girl, drawing herself up with the grace and dignity of a queen. “I never do—I never will,” he answered, fixing his deep earnest eyes upon her. She smiled, and took her basket from his hands. “Now I must be going. Good-day.” The young man was hiding her little bouquet in the snowy frill on his bosom, taking from there a tuft of dead blossoms, which had been concealed next his heart. “See, I have not parted with this,” he said, blushing almost as rosily as the girl had done. “Even now I do not like to throw it away.” “Oh! do not throw it down—that is, people might trample on it, you know.” Marguerite, unconscious of the action, held out her basket, and the young man laid his tuft of dead flowers among its blossoming contents. She looked into his face with a sweet, grateful smile, and buried the treasure he had given her deep down in her basket, for those poor dead blossoms had spent their breath on _his_ bosom, and were more dear to her than a whole wilderness of breathing roses. They parted then. The young man moved away in one direction, sighing dreamily as the fragrance of those flowers stole up from his bosom, and the girl wandered off into elysium, feeling as if every step she planted on the pavement sunk into the mosses of fairy-land, and wondering in her happiness why all the faces she saw looked so haggard and careworn. Could they not comprehend that _he_ had cared enough for her flowers to let them perish on his heart? Louison saw Mirabeau when he paused to speak with Marguerite, and watched him with a glitter of hate in her eyes, as he placed the little bouquet in his bosom. There was something in his air and manner that enraged her more than an insult would have done. She could understand the homage which even a bad man unconsciously pays to entire innocence, and felt with bitterness that it could never, on this earth, be hers. In every way this young creature had thwarted and disappointed her. When she struggled, with fierce ambition, for a place on the committee of women, sent before the king that memorable day at Versailles, this girl had been selected in her place by Mirabeau himself. This was her first accusation against him. But he had neither feared her anger or cared to appease her reproaches; on the contrary, treated both with careless laughter and annihilating contempt.