He had come to Valentine Olier's house with the firm determination to bring about a decisive interview between them, and to ask her for her hand. If he had insisted that she should receive him at a most unseasonable hour, he had had for that insistence imperative reasons which excused him beforehand for his indiscretion. His timidity before that day, and the rapid throbbing of his pulse as he finally crossed the courtyard, did not come from an embarrassment of the sort that can be explained. It was the sinking of the heart from excess of emotion, which accompanies over-powerful desire in untried sensibilities. Naturally refined, Landri had not aged himself prematurely by the abuse of precocious experiments. To this young man, who was really entitled to be so called, what awaited him behind the curtains of that ground floor was the happiness or the misery of his whole life. But, we repeat, he hoped. His eyes feasted themselves, as their custom was, on the lines of that façade, so closely associated with the image of his Valentine. Ah! would she ever be his? A reflection of her person illuminated in his eyes that two-story building, charming in very truth, whose light pilasters, modest decorations, pediment with balustrades, and niches adorned with classic busts, presented a perfect specimen of the architecture of the time of Louis XVI,--a composite style, antique and pastoral, like that extraordinary epoch itself, in which a moribund society played at idyls--awaiting the tragedy--amid Pompeian architecture. This hôtel had been the "folly" of one of the luxurious farmers-general of that day. To-day the _petite maison_, divided bourgeois-fashion into small apartments, numbered among its tenants, besides the officer's widow, a retired magistrate on the first floor, and on the second the head of a department in the ministry. Thus an elegant caprice, originally designed for the suppers of a rival of Grimod de la Reynière, found itself giving shelter to existences of quasi-cloistral regularity. How gratifying to Landri was Madame Olier's choice of a habitation so retired! Left free and alone, at twenty-seven years, with an infant son, with no near relatives, having few kindred in the world and a modest fortune, Valentine had valued in that apartment the very thing that would have disgusted so many women,--the charm of oblivion, of silence and of meditation. On the other side the ground floor looked upon a very small garden, adjoining others much larger; and as the dividing wall was concealed beneath a cloak of ivy, that enclosure of a few square yards seemed like the corner of a park.