"'And yet,' said he, 'before a charming little landscape like this you seemed happy and really satisfied a moment ago. Do you then really feel more in need of emotions and surprises than of tenderness and safety? See how beautiful it is, this stillness! How this hour of reflected lights, barred across with lengthening shadows, this water, in spray which seems caressing the sides of the rock, this motionless leafage looking as if it were silently drinking in the gold of the last sunbeams, how truly indeed is all this serene and thoughtful solemnity the expression of the beautiful and good in nature! I never used to know all this myself. It has not impressed me strongly until lately. I have always been living in the midst of dust and death, or among abstractions. I used, indeed, to dream over the pictures of history, the phantasmagoria of the past. I have sometimes seen the fleet of Cleopatra sailing to the verge of the horizon; in the silence of the night I have thought I heard the warlike trumpets of Roncesvalles; but it was the dominion of a dream, and the reality did not speak to me. But when I saw you gazing at the horizon without saying a word, with an air of content that was like nothing else in the world, I asked myself what could be the secret of your joy; and, if I must tell you all, your selfish patient was a little jealous of everything that charmed you. He set himself perturbedly to work at gazing too, when he settled the point at once; for he felt that he loved what you loved.' "You understand perfectly, my dear little sister, that in talking to me thus the Marquis told an audacious falsehood, for one can but see from all his remarks, and his manner of making them, that he has the true artist enthusiasm for nature, as well as for all else that is lovely; but he is so grateful to me, and so full of honest kindliness, that he misrepresents things in perfect good faith, and imagines himself indebted to me for something new in his intellectual life." XV One morning the Marquis, writing at the large table in the library, while Caroline at the other end was turning over some maps, laid down his pen and said to her with emotion,--