Though of the fashion of the day, her dress had that grace which the wearer alone can give; and, as I looked at her, the forest sighed deeply from its cool, green heart, the boughs tossed, showering lights upon us, and the laughter of the birds followed the wind. "We were children then," said I, "but we are not children now." I took both her hands, and held her soul to mine for a moment in a kiss that has not ended yet. * * * * * Where the beech-glades give place to the tall pines--the fragrant pines, whose song sounds for ever like the sea on a distant strand--we sat down on a bank, which in spring would be mist-blue with violets. "I have never kissed anyone before. Have you?" she asked. "No one." "Never loved anyone?" She rested her hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes. "Never." "For," said she, "if you had----" "Yes?" "I don't know. Sometimes I do not know my own thoughts. Sometimes I act and do things that seem strange to me afterwards. I made you meet me this morning out of caprice. I teased you, following you as I did to Nice, dressed as I was, from caprice. That is not me. There is something wicked and wayward in me that I cannot understand. Had it not been for me you would not have killed that man this morning." I had not thought of De Coigny till now; and the remembrance of him lying there dead in the arms of Dr. Pons came like a gloomy stain across my mind. But it soon passed. "We would have fought in any case," said I, "inevitably." She sighed, as if relieved. "He was a bad man," she said. "He deserved to die for the things he said about you to me. It was partly on that account that I arranged all that this morning, so that I might insult him before those men; but I never thought it would end as it did." "Do you know," said I, "when I killed him it was as if the blood which I shed had baptised me into a new life! My full love for you only awoke then. It was as if some spirit out of the past that had loved you for ages had suddenly been born completely." "Don't!" she said. "I hate to think of that. Let the past be gone for ever. You are yourself, alive and warm. You are my sun, my life, the air I breathe. You have been kept for me untouched. Oh, how I love you! "Listen!" she said, freeing her lips from mine, and casting her beautiful eyes upwards. "No; it is not the wind. Ah! listen! listen!" From the trees came a sound that was not the voice of the birds. Far away it seemed now, and now near. It was the spinning-song of Oberthal, that tune, thin as a thread of flax, rising, falling, poignant as Fate, and filled with the story of man--his swaddling-clothes, his marriage-bed, and his shroud. There, amidst the trees, coming from nowhere, diffused by the echoes of the wood--for a wood is a living echo--heard just then, the song of Oberthal seemed the voice of Fate herself.