Franceline had found it cold, and had slipt away, without saying why, to her own room upstairs. She was sitting on the floor with her hands in her lap, and her head pressed against the latticed window, watching the scarlet geraniums as they shivered in the evening breeze and dropped into their moist autumn tomb. A large crystal moon was rising above the woods beyond the river, and a few stars were coming out. She counted them, and listened to the wood-pigeon cooing in the park, and to the solitary note of an owl that answered from some distant grove. But the voices of wood and field were not to her now what they once had been. There was something in her that responded to them still, but not in the old way; she had drifted somewhere beyond their reach; she was hearkening for other voices, since one had touched her with a power these had never possessed, and whose echoing sweetness had converted the sounds that had till then been her only music into a blank and aching silence. Other pulses had been stirred, other chords struck within her, so strong and deep, and unlike the old childish ones, that these had become to her what the memory of the joys of childhood are to the full-grown man--a sweet shadow that lingers when the substance has fled; part of a life that has been lived, that can never be quickened again, but is enshrined in memory. She was very pale, almost like a shadow herself, as she sat there in the silver gloom. Mothers who met her in her walks about the neighborhood looked wistfully after the gentle young face, and said with a sigh: “What a pity! And so young too!” Yet Franceline was not ill; not even ailing; she never complained even of fatigue, and when her father tapped the pale cheek and asked how his _Clair-de-lune_ was, she would answer brightly that she had never been better in her life, and as she had no cough, he believed her. A cough was Raymond’s single diagnosis of disease and death; he had a vague but deep-seated belief that nobody, no young person certainly, ever died a natural death without this fatal premonitory symptom. And yet he could not help following Franceline with an anxious eye as he saw her walking listlessly about the garden, or sitting with a book in her hand that she let drop every now and then to look dreamily out of the window, and only resumed with an evident effort. Sometimes she would go and lean her arms on the rail at the end of the garden, and stand there for an hour together gazing at the familiar landscape as if she were discovering some new feature in it, or straining her eyes to see some distant object. He could not lay his finger on any particular symptom that justified anxiety, and still he was anxious; a change of some sort had come over the child; she grew more and more like her mother, and it was not until Armengarde was several years older than Franceline that the disease which had been germinating in her system from childhood developed itself and proved fatal.