When I clambered up to my room late that night, the flowers were no longer where I had put them. I had been torturing myself all the evening with the thought that Hermine might have felt offended, and that I should find them torn in pieces and thrown down at my door, or that she would be waiting for me with a severe reprimand for my boldness and impertinence. But I could find no trace of them, and went to sleep, soothed by the conviction that they had been carefully put by in a glass of water, or were occupying a place on her pillow by the side of her dainty cheek. I feared to meet Thérèse's sorrowful face again the next night, and was troubled so much by the thought of it through the day, that I fairly deserted her that evening and bought my two bouquets elsewhere. With one of these, which I had taken care should be of a finer quality than before, I repeated my experiment of the preceding night and with the same gratifying result. But the day after, forgetting, until it was too late, that I had given Thérèse fair cause to be seriously angry with me, habit carried me to my old resort again, though I had fully determined to reach home by another way, and to patronize, for the future, my new _bouquetière,_ who was not only old and ugly, but of the masculine gender. Habit--and perhaps wish had something to do with it--was too strong, however, and I found myself turning down the Quai Voltaire at the customary hour the next evening. Much to my surprise, and somewhat to my mortification, Thérèse greeted me with her old sunny smile. Her _"Bon jour, Monsieur,"_ was as cordial as ever; and it even seemed to me--and that didn't in the least tend to compose me--that her eyes sparkled with an archness which I had never seen in them before, and that her voice had in it a tinge of malice, as she held out to me two of her finest bunches, saying,-- _"Est-ce que, Monsieur en desire deux encore ce soir?"_ I was very angry with her for being in such good-humor, and believe I was anything but aimable or polite with her. Why did she not look hurt or offended and reproach me for my desertion, instead of almost disarming my senseless anger by her gentleness? "It seems that Monsieur forgets his old friends, sometimes," she continued, as I took the flowers she had been holding towards me, and was fumbling in my pocket for the change. "Forget!" I stammered; for the temper I found her in had so completely ruffled mine, that I was hardly sufficiently master of myself to be able to answer her at all,--"what makes you think I forget? Am I not here this evening, as usual?" "This evening, yes,--but last night you did not come; or were you here too late to find me? I"----she paused, and, with her color a little heightened, as though she had narrowly escaped making a disclosure, looked another way,--"Monsieur must have bought his flowers elsewhere, yesterday. Were they as fresh and sweet as mine?"