"Ah, well!" sighed Eloise, looking timidly from me to Madame Ancelot, who, having placed the lamp on the table, stood, with all a peasant's horror of fresh air in the house, waiting to shut the windows, "if you _must_ go---- But you will come back?" "To-morrow; and you will look after her, Madame Ancelot, will you not?" "Mais oui," said the good woman with a smile and as if she were talking to two children. "Mademoiselle need not be afraid; there are no robbers here; nothing more dangerous than the rabbits and the birds; and if there were, why, Ancelot has his gun." Eloise tripped over to the woman and gave her a kiss; then, glancing back at me, she laughed and ran out into the tiny hall to get her hat. "I will go with you as far as--a little way," she said, as she tied the strings of her hat, craning up on her toe-tips to see herself in a high mirror on the wall. On the drawbridge she hung for a moment, peeping over at the still water of the moat, in which the stars were beginning to cast reflections. "How dark, and still, and secret it looks!" murmured she. "Toto, has it ever drowned anyone?" "Why do you ask?" replied I to the question that I myself had put to Joubert years ago. "I don't know," said Eloise, "but it looks as if it had." Ah, the evil moat! The water lilies blossomed there in summer; all the length of a summer's day the darting dragon-flies cast their blue-gauze reflections upon the water; Amy Féraud and Francine Volnay might cast their laughter and cigarette-ends for ever on its surface, leaning over the bridge-rail and seeing nothing. It was left for the heart of a child to question its secret and divine its treason. The path from the Pavilion cut through the trees and opened on the carriage-drive to the château. When we reached the drive, Eloise, terrified by the dark and the unaccustomed trees, was afraid to return alone. So I had to go back with her to the drawbridge. "To-morrow!" said she. "To-morrow!" replied I. She gave me a moist kiss--just as children give; then, as if that was not enough, she flung her arms around my neck, squeezed me, and then ran across the drawbridge, laughing. "Good-night!" I cried; and "Good-night!" followed me through the trees as I ran, for, even running most of the way, I had scarcely time to catch the last train at Evry. It was late when I reached Paris; and as I drove through the blazing streets I felt as though I had taken a deep breath of some intoxicating air. The vision of Eloise in her new home pursued me. I felt as though I had taken a child from the jaws of a dragon. I had done a good act, and God repaid me, for Eloise had brought me a gift far better than pearls. She had brought me all that old freshness of long ago; she had brought me fresh in her hands the flowers of childhood; she had given me back the warmth of heart, the clearness of sight, the joy in little things, the joy without cause, which the war of sex and the world robs from a man.