Carola looked over her shoulder and saw the girl; the two gazed directly at each other. “Who is that lady?” asked Clémence, for she saw Luc’s salutation and the stranger’s faint, answering smile. “A Polish Countess,” he answered, “whom I met in Prague and in Paris.” “Why, what is she here for--alone?” questioned Mademoiselle de Séguy. “And will you not present me to her?” Her ardent desire to be gracious to any acquaintance of his showed in her eager words. Luc smiled. “I never knew her well enough,” he said, “and it seems she does not wish to speak to me.” Certainly Carola, without a backward look, had disappeared in the crowd. Clémence seemed disappointed. “I wish she had stayed,” she remarked sincerely. Luc made no answer; he was wondering what had brought Carola to Aix. He had thought that she was still in Austria; he supposed she might be on her way to Avignon; yet he knew M. de Richelieu was in Paris, and under any circumstances it seemed curious that she should be alone at a public fête--she who had always affected such magnificence. A little sigh from Clémence recalled him from his momentary reflection. “It is cold,” she repeated timidly. “Come out into the sun,” he answered, and they moved slowly away from the crowd, beyond the elms, and so beyond the fête, into a little slope of meadow land where the grass was yet untrod and green. The western distance, blue, hazed, and mysterious, was half hid by a belt of beech trees, whose boughs bent beneath a load of tawny, orange, gold, and crimson leaves. The distant, mechanical music of the fête was in the air, and occasional gusts of laughter and of applause broke the monotonous rhythm of the melody. Luc and Clémence moved farther and farther away from these sounds; the streaming sunlight wrapped them in warmth and glory, the beech trees were a dazzle of golden colour before their eyes, and the sky overhead was clear blue without a trace of cloud. The girl sighed, looked at the trees, the heavens, then at the ground. “Are you sad, my dear?” asked Luc very tenderly. “No,” she answered in a thin voice; “only I should like to do--something--for you.” “For me?” His face flashed into a charming smile. “Yes.” She lifted her childlike countenance and her voice was stronger. “Sometimes I wish that you were poor or lonely or--despised--that I might prove what I can only say now.” He was abashed and overwhelmed. He saw tears of sincerity glittering on her long, drooping lashes; the heroic in his own soul was quick to salute the heroic rising to him in hers. He stopped and turned to face her. “You must not say that,” he said, taking her by the shoulders very gently. “I do not deserve that you should say that, Clémence.” She shuddered and bent her head lower. “I am such an ordinary woman--but now I feel I could do something great--for you. I--I cared for you before you ever thought of me, you know. When you were in Paris--I used--to--pray--every night--that you might come back.”