How she had angered him! All the pent-up gall of years against the supercilia of the class from which she sprang surged in that moment to his lips. He bethought him now of the thousand humiliations his proud spirit had suffered at their hands when he noted the disdain with which they addressed him, speaking to him--because he was compelled to carve his living with a quill--as though he were less than mire. It was not so much against her scorn of him that he voiced his bitter grievance, but against the entire noblesse of France, which denied him the right to carry a high head because he had not been born of Madame la Duchesse, Madame la Marquise, or Madame la Comtesse. All the great thoughts of a wondrous transformation, which had been sown in him by the revolutionary philosophers he had devoured with such appreciation, welled up now, and such scraps of that infinity of thought as could find utterance he cast before the woman who had scorned him for his station. Presumptuous he had accounted himself--but only until she had found him so. By that the presumption, it seemed, had been lifted from him, and he held that what he had said to her of the love he bore her was no more than by virtue of his manhood he had the right to say. She drew back before him, and shrank in some measure of fear, for he looked very fierce. Moreover, he had said things which professed him a revolutionist, and the revolutionists, whilst being a class which she had been taught to despise and scorn, dealt, she knew, in a violence which it might be ill to excite. “Monsieur,” she faltered, and with her hand she clutched at her riding-habit of green velvet, as if preparing to depart, “you are not yourself. I am beyond measure desolated that you should have so spoken to me. We have been good friends, M. La Boulaye. Let us forget this scene. Shall we?” Her tones grew seductively conciliatory. La Boulaye half turned from her, and his smouldering eye fell upon “The Discourses” lying on the grass. He stooped and picked up the volume. The act might have seemed symbolical. For a moment he had cast aside his creed to woo a woman, and now that she had denied him he returned to Rousseau, and gathered up the tome almost in penitence at his momentary defection. “I am quite myself, Mademoiselle,” he answered quietly. His cheeks were flushed, but beyond that, his excitement seemed to have withered. “It is you who yesternight, for one brief moment and again to-day--were not yourself, and to that you owe it that I have spoken to you as I have done.” Between these two it would seem as the humour of the one waned, that of the other waxed. Her glance kindled anew at his last words. “I?” she echoed. “I was not myself? What are you saying, Monsieur the Secretary?” “Last night, and again just now, you were so kind, you--you smiled so sweetly--”