All the sadness and pain that my past relationship with her had caused me was now banished, for I could read in her eyes, or, blind that I was, I thought I could read in her eyes, that the past was for her not in the new world in which she found herself. We sat down on the little grassy bank, and talked things over, the three of us. Three people who had found a treasure could not have been more happily jubilant as we talked of the future. "And you know," said I, "you will never want money. Franzius will be rich with his music; and even should he never care to write again, I have a large sum of money in trust for you. Oh, don't ask who gave it in trust for you both! It is there." We talked till the dusk fell and star after star came out. So dark was it when I left that a tiny point of light in Eloise's hair made me hold her head close to look. It was a glow-worm that had fallen from the bending hollyhocks. It seemed to me like a little star that God had placed there as a portent of fortune and happiness. When I got back to Paris my guardian was out. I went to my rooms to think things over. My thoughts had received a new orientation. I remembered my delight that morning on finding myself free--free of all that heaven! Ah, if I could only have loved her as Franzius did! What, then, was this thing called Love, which I had never known, the thing which I had never guessed till to-day, till this evening, there in the sunk garden of Saluce, in the dusk so filled with the sound of unseen wings and the music of an unknown tongue? Some drawing things were on the table. I have always been a fair artist, and sketching has been one of my few amusements. Almost mechanically I took a pencil, and tried to sketch the face of Eloise Feliciani. But it was not the face of Eloise Feliciani that appeared on the paper. I gazed on it, when it was finished, in troubled amazement. It was the face of a woman--yet it was also the portrait of a child. Ah, yes; beyond any doubt of memory it was the face of Margaret von Lichtenberg, the old portrait in the gallery of Schloss Lichtenberg! Yet it was the face, also, of little Carl! CHAPTER XXX THE MARRIAGE OF ELOISE "We will give them a good send-off," said my guardian, as, some days later, we discussed the matter of Eloise's wedding. "Let them be married at Etiolles; have the village en fête. I will settle for it all." The proposition seemed good; nowhere could one find a more suitable spot for such a wedding than the little church of Etiolles; yet it met with opposition.