They spoke of books, and Angela was evidently familiar with those which were meat and drink to Richard and Lyddon. Isabey was not so good a classical scholar as either of the other two men, but in modern French literature and in the Romance languages he was far superior to either. “Do you remember,” asked Richard, “the craze you had for Alfred de Musset, Gustav Nadaud, and those other delicious rapscallions of their time?” “Certainly I do,” answered Isabey. “And can you spout them as you did when we lived together in the Latin quarter?” “Rather more, I think,” answered Isabey. “The better I know those rapscallion poets, as you call them, the more I like the fellows.” “Then give us some of them, such as you used to do in the old days, when I would have to collar you and choke you in order to make you leave off.” They were standing in a little open glade, across which a great ash tree had fallen prone and dead. Isabey, half-sitting upon the tree trunk, began with his favorite Alfred de Musset. His voice and enunciation were admirable, and his French as superior in tone to Lyddon’s as the French of Paris is superior to that of Stratford-le-bow. If the spell of Isabey’s singing enchanted Angela, so even in a greater degree did his repetition of these latter-day poets, who, leaving the simple external things, tune their lutes to the music of the soul, a music always touched with melancholy and ever finding an echo in every heart. Isabey, with a strong and increasing interest, watched Angela slyly. She was so unsophisticated and had led the life so like the snowdrops in the garden that things overimpressed her. She listened with her heart upon her lips to the verses which Isabey repeated, and her color came and went with an almost painful rapidity. The latter-day French poets had been until then an unopened book to her, and the effect upon her was overmastering. They introduced her into a whole new world of passionate feeling, and it seemed to her that Isabey, who had opened the gateway into that garden of the soul, was the most dazzling man on earth. Isabey saw this, for Angela was easily read. It was a new problem for him, these young feminine creatures, who cultivate their emotions and live upon them; who cleverly simulate intellect, but who are at bottom all feeling; who can listen, unmoved, to the tale of Troy Town, but who blush and tremble at a canzonet which tells the story of a kiss. When Angela listened with rapt attention or when, as presently, she spoke freely and gayly, Isabey thought her handsome, although not strictly beautiful, nor likely to become so. But what freshness, what unconscious grace was hers! She might have been one of Botticelli’s nymphs, with the woods and fields her natural haunts and proper setting.