CHAPTER LVI. Cosmo ran down the stairs, and out of the gate of Madame Roche’s house, much too greatly excited to think of returning to his little room. The discovery was so sudden and so extraordinary that the lad was quite unable to compose his excitement or collect his thoughts. Strange enough, though Mary of Melmar had been so much in his mind, he had never once, until this day, associated her in the smallest degree with the beautiful old lady of St. Ouen. When he began to think of all the circumstances, he could not account to himself for his extraordinary slowness of perception. At, least a score of other people, totally unlikely and dissimilar, had roused Cosmo’s hopes upon his journey. Scarcely a place they had been in which did not afford the imaginative youth a glimpse somewhere of some one who might be the heroine; yet here he had been living almost by her side without a suspicion, until a sudden confidence, given in the simplest and most natural manner, disclosed her in a moment--Mary of Melmar! He had known she must be old--he had supposed she must have children--but it was strange, overpowering, a wild and sudden bewilderment, to find in her the mother of Desirée and Marie. Cosmo did not go home to his little room--he hurried along the narrow streets of St. Ouen, carried on by the stress and urgency of his own thoughts. Then he emerged upon the river side, where even the picturesque and various scene before him failed to beguile his own crowding fancies. He saw without seeing the river boats, moored by the quay, the Norman fishermen and market-women, the high-gabled houses, which corresponded so pleasantly with those high caps and characteristic dresses, the whole bright animation and foreign coloring of the scene. In the midst of it all he saw but one figure, a figure which somehow belonged to it, and took individuality and tone from this surrounding;--Mary of Melmar! but not the pensive, tender Mary of that sweet Scottish country-side, with all its streams and woodlands--not a Mary to be dreamt of any longer on the leafy banks of Tyne, or amid those roofless savage walls of the old Strength of Norlaw. With an unexpressed cry of triumph, yet an untellable thrill of disappointment, the lad hurried along those sun-bright banks of Seine. It was this scene she belonged to; the quaint, gray Norman town, with its irregular roofs and gables, its cathedral piling upward to a fairy apex those marvelous pinnacles and towers, its bright provincial costume and foreign tints of color, its river, bright with heavy picturesque boats, and floating baths, and all the lively life of a French urban stream. It was not that meditative breadth of country, glorious with the purple Eildons and brown waters, sweet with unseen birds and burns, where the summer silences and sounds were alike sacred, and where the old strongholds lay at rest like old warriors, watching the peace of the land. No--she was not Mary of Melmar--she was Madame Roche de St.