"How sweet it all is," exclaimed the Abbé, yawning with infinite content. Then he lay back in his bed, stared at the curious patterned canopy above him and nursed his waking thoughts. He thought or the "Romaunt de la Rose," beautiful, but all too brief. Of the Claude in Lady Delaware's collection.[1] Of a wonderful pair of blonde trousers he would get Madame Belleville to make for him. Of a mysterious park full of faint echoes and romantic sounds. Of a great stagnant lake that must have held the subtlest frogs that ever were, and was surrounded with dark unreflected trees, and sleeping fleurs de luce. Of Saint Rose, the well-known Peruvian virgin; how she vowed herself to perpetual virginity when she was four years old[2]; how she was beloved by Mary, who from the pale fresco in the Church of Saint Dominic, would stretch out her arms to embrace her; how she built a little oratory at the end of the garden and prayed and sang hymns in it till all the beetles, spiders, snails and creeping things came round to listen; how she promised to marry Ferdinand de Flores, and on the bridal morning perfumed herself and painted her lips, and put on her wedding frock, and decked her hair with roses, and went up to a little hill not far without the walls of Lima; how she knelt there some moments calling tenderly upon Our Lady's name, and how Saint Mary descended and kissed Rose upon the forehead and carried her up swiftly into heaven. [Illustration: St. Rose of Lima] He thought of the splendid opening of Racine's "Britannicus." Of a strange pamphlet he had found in Helen's library, called "A Plea for the Domestication of the Unicorn." Of the "Bacchanals of Sporion."[3] Of Morales' Madonnas with their high egg-shaped creamy foreheads and well-crimped silken hair. Of Rossini's "Stabat Mater" (that delightful _démodé_ piece of decadence, with a quality in its music like the bloom upon wax fruit). Of love, and of a hundred other things. Then his half-closed eyes wandered among the prints that hung upon the rose-striped walls. Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque and domino smiling horribly, exquisite letchers leaning over the shoulders of smooth doll-like girls and doing nothing in particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and huge bird-like women mingling in some rococo room, lighted mysteriously by the flicker of a dying fire that throws great shadows upon wall and ceiling.