Suddenly all his sadness fled, all his brooding thoughts vanished. He was conscious of a thrill in his heart and of the sweetness of living. The face before him was one mirroring youth and the ignorance of youth, eyes that sparkled, seeing only the surface of life. And in every line of her figure, in every movement of hers, was immaturity. While he was examining a pair of shoes a heavy-set woman, with purple cheeks, stuck her head through a door in the rear, and said something about showing the gentleman the new style of footwear they had received the day before. What was there in the girl’s voice that made something within him vibrate? He began to take off his left shoe. “Not the left but the right, _monsieur_;” and she emitted a little laugh with the unrestraint of a child. He did as he was bidden, and felt a peculiar intimacy as the girl bent down to help him slip on the new shoe. As she bent forward his eyes rested on her lustrous black hair—wavy without being curly—combed back from her low forehead. He was thinking of Miriam, the girl of Gnesen. There was a striking resemblance between the two, except that the girl before him had somnolent black eyes while the iris in Miriam’s eyes were of a deep dark-blue. There was the same lack of artifice in her speech, the same touch of tenderness in her voice. Likewise was her face a book with blank pages. He lingered in the little shop even after he had made his purchase. Was the woman who had spoken through the doorway her mother? No, she was an aunt, for whom she was working. Her mother lived in the country, in a little village near Nantes, and her mother had sent her to Paris to earn her living. Was her mother poor? Yes, very, very poor. “Where do you come from?” she presently questioned him with equal candor, and looked up into his face without the least embarrassment. “Where do you think?” The deep corners of his large mouth drooped and there was a faint smile on his oval face. She straightened up, her hands now behind her, her eyes resting on his light-brown hair, on his thoughtful face. “From—from Normandy—all the men in Normandy are blond and have bluish eyes——” He laughed with frank amusement, the amusement a child’s talk provokes, and told her his eyes only seemed blue but they were greenish. “But a thing is only what it seems,” she said, with naive protest. “I grant you it is good philosophy but not all philosophy is truth.” There was a comical expression on his face as he uttered the last, and she looked puzzled. A bit of shyness came over her. “So you can’t guess where I come from,” he said, looking tenderly at her. Then he added, as if speaking to himself, “I come from a country where they wish I had come from another country, and if I had come from another country they would have wished the same.” He threw his head back and laughed but not without a touch of bitterness in his tone.