ho donned the regulation black
coat, white cravat and pumps at meal hours. Luckily, de Gery proposed to
remain there only an hour or two,--long enough to breathe, to rest his
eyes from the glare of burnished silver and to free his heavy head from
the helmet with the painful chin-strap that the sun had placed upon it.

From the couch on which he lay, the beautiful landscape, terraces of
light, quivering olive-trees, orange-groves of darker hue, their leaves
gleaming as if wet in the moving rays, seemed to come down to his window
in tiers of verdure of different shades, amid which the scattered villas
stood forth in dazzling whiteness, among them Maurice Trott, the
banker's, recognizable by the capricious richness of its architecture
and the height of its palm-trees. The Levantine's palace, whose gardens
extended to the very windows of the hotel, had sheltered for several
months past an artistic celebrity, the sculptor Brehat, who was dying of
consumption and owed the prolongation of his life to that princely
hospitality. This proximity of a famous moribund, of which the landlord
was very proud and which he would have been glad to charge in his
bill,--the name of Brehat, which de Gery had so often heard mentioned
with admiration in Felicia Ruys' studio, led his thoughts back to the
lovely face with the pure outlines, which he had seen for the last time
in the Bois de Boulogne, leaning upon Mora's shoulder. What had become
of the unfortunate girl when that support had failed her? Would the
lesson profit her in the future? And, by a strange coincidence, while he
was thinking thus of Felicia, a great white grey-hound went frisking
along a tree-lined avenue in the sloping garden before him. One would
have said that it was Kadour himself,--the same short hair, the same
fierce, slender red jaws. Paul, at his open window, was assailed in an
instant by all sorts of visions, sweet and depressing. Perhaps the
superb scenery before him, the lofty mountain up which a blue shadow was
running, tarrying in all the inequalities of the ground, assisted the
vagabondage of his thought. Under the orange and lemon trees, set out in
straight lines for cultivation, stretched vast fields of violets in
close, regular clusters, traversed by little irrigating canals, whose
walls of white stone made sharp breaks in the luxuriant verdure.

An exquisite odor arose, of violets fermented in the sun, a hot boudoir
perfume, enervating, weakening, which ca