"Not by a single sentence of protestation? An avowal would have sent me from him without a regret. If we had not met at all after that first look, that first day, I am convinced I should have been haunted by him just the same! There were long minutes when we did not speak or look at each other; but those minutes were swept with harmonies. Now, Monsieur Loris, would you call that love, or is it a sort of summer-time madness?" "Probably both, Marquise; but there was a third meeting?" "After three days, Monsieur; days when I forced myself to remain indoors; and the struggle it was, when I could close my eyes and see him waiting there under the trees!" "Ah! There had been an appointment?" "Pardon, Monsieur; you are perhaps confounding this with some remembered adventure of your own. There was no appointment. But I felt confident that blue-eyed ogre was walking every morning along the path where I met him first, and that he would compel me to open the door and walk straight to our own clump of bushes so long as I did not send him away." "And you finally went?" She nodded. "He was there. His smile was like sunshine. He approached me, but I--I did not wait. I went straight to him. He said, 'At last, Mademoiselle Unknown!'" "Pardon; but it is your words I have most interest in," reminded her confessor. "But I said so few. I remember I had some violets, and he asked me what they were called in French. I told him I was going away; I had fed the carp for the last time. He was also leaving. He had gathered some wild forget-me-nots. He was coming into Paris." "And you parted unknown to each other?" "How could I do else? When he said, 'I bid you good-bye, Mademoiselle Unknown, but we shall meet again.' Then--then I did correct him a little; I said _Madame_ Unknown, Monsieur." "Ah! And to that--?" "He said not a word, only looked at me; _how_ he looked at me! I felt guilty as a criminal. When I looked up he turned away--turned very politely, with lifted hat and a bow even you could not improve upon, Monsieur Loris, I watched him out of sight in the forest. He never halted; and he never turned his head." "You might at least have let him go without the thought that you were a flirtatious matron with a husband somewhere in the back-ground." "Yes; I almost regret that. Still, since I had to send him away, what matter how? It would have been so common-place had I said: 'We receive on Thursdays; find Loris Dumaresque when you reach Paris; he will present you.' No!"--and she shook her head laughingly, "the three days were quite enough. He is an unknown world; a romance only suggested, and the suggestion is delicious. I would not for the world have him nearer prosaic reality." "You will forget him in another three weeks," prophesied Dumaresque; "he has been only a shadow of a man; a romantic dream. I shall refuse to accept any but realities as rivals."