She did not understand him. There was perplexity in the girl’s face. No one had ever looked at her in this manner. There was something beseeching in his half-closed eyes, something eloquently covetous, and he gazed at her as if she were an inanimate thing, a picture or statue of the masters in the Louvre. His next question sounded still more puzzling. Was she always in the shop? What a question! She was either in the shop or in the rear helping with the housework. Her employer was not boarding her and paying her mother ten francs a month for nothing! As he was leaving he suddenly turned around and asked her name. “Marguerite,” she told him. He said he would like to be her Faust. She looked at him incomprehensively and said, “_Vous êtes drôle_.” “You are not the only one who thinks me funny,” he replied. She laughed. He walked away with drooping head and lagging step. II. He was soon on Boulevard Strassbourg, a mere drop of spray in the human tide. People were coming and going, chatting and laughing, the zest of life everywhere. He, too, now felt the zest of life. He was no longer feeling that the marrow of his life had dried up. There was spring in his heart, the sap of renewed life was flowing through his veins; no, he was not dying. He was humming to himself a few verses of an old song of his, which had been set to music by an admirer. Yes, sadness was creeping into his heart and enveloping his whole being, but it was not the sadness that possessed him earlier in the day. It was the sadness of longing, of woeful longing, the sadness of music in a minor key, which thrilled him even as it kept tugging at his heartstrings. Suddenly, oblivious of the people that were passing, he paused, and, clenching his fists with joy vibrating through the whole being, his face beaming with a strange light, he uttered, almost loud enough to be heard by passersby, “I am myself again—love has returned!” And love had returned. He was his old self again. Youth had come back. His features had almost changed. There came a new softness in his eyes, languor in his face, the dreaminess of his student days. He had not been in love since Miriam had gone back to marry the drover’s son. He had known friendship but not love. He was not trying to argue himself out of his sudden passion for the girl in the shoe shop; he was only explaining himself to himself. What did it matter so long as love had again entered his heart, so long as he was restless with the yearnings and longings of his student days, so long as he felt the ache of blossoming youth! Indeed, what else mattered!