Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him the dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid, pearl-gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François soared aloft in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large private garden waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing wall, and, as far as one could see, the populous Boulevard de Montparnasse stretched away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with cabs and drays. In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which, although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of which that street with its _ancien-régime_ name contained some half-score or more a quarter of a century since. Alas! they are vanishing one by one. As soon as the owner of one of them dies, the crowbars of the demolishers set to work. An aristocratic plaything of stone is razed to the ground. In its place rises one of those vulgar income-producing houses, on whose threshold one finds it difficult to imagine the lingering of such a lover as this. To be sure, it is simply prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment, when he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his love.