When the summer came and she went to the coast, with a score of wonderful dresses, she sighed for companionship more drearily yet. Hitherto, at such places, she had sat among her compeers, amiably chatting. Now she appeared too young to be congruous to the circle of the old--was too old to participate in the pastimes of the young. Scant of breath and stiff in the joints, she viewed morosely the laughing women trooping to the tennis courts. Shrunken beneath her youthful frocks, she dared not don a bathing costume and reveal her wasted form among the sirens lolling by the tents. Queer as the fact seemed, her years irked her more this summer than they had done while she looked her age. The anniversary of the miracle found her in low spirits, and suffering from lumbago. There was a lad, attractive, promising, on the threshold of a career--such a lad as, thirty-eight years earlier, she had pictured her baby growing up to be. She had made his acquaintance at a "feeve o'clock," where, being so young, he felt shy, and where to find himself speaking to this enchantress confused him more still. But her tone had promptly relieved him of his dread that he ought to play the courtier. When she invited him to call on her, she asked him as she might have asked a schoolboy. Her interest in Guy Verne's ambitions yielded to her gradually a healthier outlook. Stranger still, as the months passed, a real and deep affection stole into the old egoist's nature. She was less purposeless, less futile for it. Almost, as she entered into his boyish forecasts, and made fight of his little setbacks, it seemed to her as if her son had lived. One day the boy flung his arms round her and begged her to be his wife. It was horrible. She repulsed him, shuddering. "Don't, Guy, don't!" Entreaties poured from him. "If you understood!" she moaned. "I shall have gone to my grave while you're a young man." He thought she meant that she was very ill. "I'll nurse you back to health. Victorine, I love you with all my soul." "You don't love me a bit," she said. "There is nothing in me for you to love--I am as utterly different from you as if there were fifty years between us; you only imagine you love me because you admire my face. Good heavens, have I ever said a single word to lead you to think I cared for you in such a way?" An English boy might have suffered as much, but would have taken it more quietly. This boy was French, and he did not hide what he felt. He answered vehemently that she had led him to think so every time they talked of his future. "If you didn't care for me, why should it interest you?" He raved of his broken heart. He loaded her with reproaches. "You've shammed to me, mocked me, just to amuse yourself!" "No." She was crying. "I _am_ fond of you--fonder of you than of anybody in the world. But not like that. I shall never care like that again for anyone." "I wish I had never seen you. I wish I were dead."