In rejoinder he had referred to the tragic circumstance that he possessed a heart, placing his hand over the region where hearts are supposed to be, with a gesture expressive of severe internal pain. In short, there was no manner of doubt that M. Isidore was the victim of unrequited passion of the most powerful description, or that the sympathy implied or expressed by Mrs. Allonby's reception of his hinted confidences was balm to his wounded breast. She told him quite plainly that he was a fool--a fact that he admitted with gusto--that he was young, and would soon get over it, which he denied with fury. Some such confidences had been imparted during chance meetings and aimless rovings along paths through pine-woods aromatic with undergrowth of myrtle and juniper; through solemn olive-groves, hushed and dim, their drooping foliage tangled with azure lights; between vineyards; by lonely cottages, pergola-shaded; through shadowy dells and along sunny ridge-tops. In the bee-haunted silence of these secluded ways suddenly, round a corner, up a ravine, down a steep, emerging from an aisle of pine-trunks, anything or anybody might appear as if by magic. Sometimes a mule, pattering softly and steadily under panniers of household goods and garden stuff, and followed by a peasant with ready smile and chat in broken French; now an old woman leading a goat; sometimes men or women laden with faggots and grass more heavily than their own patient, soft-eyed beasts; sometimes a gaily-caparisoned donkey bearing a tourist, sometimes a whole noisy troop of them; now a solitary pedestrian, now a numerous party, breaking the charmed quiet by confused babble of nasal American, guttural German, slurred English, or burred French; sometimes the sudden, abhorred gurgle of Miss Boundrish. The suddenness and unexpectedness of these apparitions, the feeling that anything--a wood-nymph, a fairy, a mountain gnome, a Greek faun, the face of an old friend, or the bearer of some new fresh happiness--might appear was a great charm. One afternoon Ermengarde had been sitting under a pine-tree on a sandy bank by the path, looking across the ravine at the great sweep of crag-peaked mountains running down to a broad blue space of sea, when the figure of M. Isidore issued from hidden depths, and was suddenly outlined on the sky in front of her. Quite naturally, and without hesitation, he let himself down on the myrtle-covered bank near the lady, but a little lower down, so that in speaking he had to look up. The easy, friendly ways of this attendant Ariel sometimes aroused a momentary wonder, soon stilled by the reflection that it was "only M. Isidore," a convenient and agreeable foreigner, outside conventions, socially non-existent, like the peasants who chatted and smiled so pleasantly in passing.