"No," she said softly when she had turned to him again, "do not kiss me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country, but I cannot stay in it forever. I was being smothered there by all the dust of those dead centuries; I was being slowly crushed by the iron weight of their old customs and their old laws--all horribly alive when they should have been long ago in their graves. There was nothing around me that was not old: old walls and towers, ancient tapestries and arms, musty rooms, yellowed manuscripts. The age of the place, it seemed to become a soul-in-itself. It seemed to get a consciousness and to hate me because I was not as it was. There was nothing that was not old--and I was young." As she remembered it, her face grew almost sulky. "Even if it had not been for you, I believe I should have come away again. I was so angry at it all that I could even have put on a Paquin gown--if I had had a Paquin gown!--and worn it at dinner in the big dining-hall of my ancestors." He understood. He realized--none better--the hunger and thirst for Paris: for the lights of the boulevards, the clatter of the dominoes on the café-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the Champs Élysées, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. Honoré by day or the Boul' Miche' by night. Nevertheless, he had lately been an American headed for America, and so he said: "Just wait till you see Broadway!" Vitoria smiled, but she remained serious. "I wanted you to know that--first," she said: "to know that I came away this second time in large part because of you, but not wholly." "I think," said Cartaret, "that I can manage to forgive that." "And then--there is something else. You saw my brother in a great castle and on a great estate, but he is not rich, and I am very poor." Cartaret laughed. "Was that what was on your mind? My dear, _I'm_ rich--I'm frightfully rich!" "Rich?" Her tone was all incredulity. "It happened the day you left Paris. Oh, I know I ought to have told you at the castle, but I forgot it. You see, there was so little time to talk to you and so many more important things to say." He told her all about it while the dusk slowly deepened. Chitta should have a salary for remaining in a cottage that he would give her in Alava and never leaving it. He would give his friends that dinner now--Houdon and Devignes, Varachon and Garnier--a dinner of celebration at which the host would be present and to which even Gaston François Louis Pasbeaucoup and the elephantine Madame would sit down. There would be bushels of strawberries. Seraphin would be pensioned for life, so that he might paint only the pictures that his heart demanded, and Fourget--yes, Cartaret would embrace dear old Fourget like a true Gaul. In the Luxembourg Gardens the statues of the old gods smiled and held their peace. "You--you can study too," said Cartaret. "You can have the best art-masters in the world, and you shall have them."