The sun went down behind the low hills, and the young lady cried that she must hasten home; her aunt would be vexed at her for staying so long. Yvon said, his faith, she might be vexed. If Mlle. de Ste. Valerie might not go out with her brother, the head of her house and her natural guardian, he knew not with whom she might go; and muttered under his breath something I did not hear. So we went back to the chateau, and still I was in the bright dream, shutting my eyes when it seemed like to break away from me. The evening was bright and joyous, like the one before. Again we three supped alone, and it seemed this was the custom, the Countess Lalange (it was the name of the aunt) seldom leaving her own salon, save to pass to her private apartments beyond it. We spent an hour there,--in her salon, that is,--after supper, and I must bring my violin, but not for dance music this time. I played all the sweetest and softest things I knew; and now and then the young lady would clap her hands, when I played one of my mother's songs, and say that her nurse had sung it to her, and how did I learn it, in America? They were the peasant songs, she said, the sweetest in the world. The lady aunt listened patiently, but I think she had no music in her; only once she asked if I had no sacred music; and when I played our psalm-tunes, she thought them not the thing at all. But last of all, when it was time for us to go away, I played lightly, and as well as I knew how to play, my mother's favourite song, that was my own also; and at this, the young girl's head drooped, and her eyes filled with tears. Her mother, too, had sung it! How many other mothers, I ask myself sometimes, how many hearts, sad and joyful, have answered to those notes, the sweetest, the tenderest in the world? "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime; Jamais je ne t'oublierai!" CHAPTER IX. THIS was one day of many, my dear. They came and went, and I thought each one brighter than the last. When I had been a month at Chateau Claire, I could hardly believe it more than a week, so quickly and lightly the time went. The mornings, two children at play; the afternoons, three. I suppose it was because the brother and sister were so strangely like each other, that I grew so soon to feel Mlle. Valerie as my friend; and she, sweet soul, took me at Yvon's word, and thought me, perhaps, a fine fellow, and like her own people. That she never fully learned the difference is one of the many things for which I have to thank a gracious God.