had torn rest from under my head,
shaken me from my couch, carried me abroad with the lure of a vivid yet
solemn fancy--a summer-night solitude on turf, under trees, near a
deep, cool lakelet. I told the scene realized; the crowd, the masques,
the music, the lamps, the splendours, the guns booming afar, the bells
sounding on high. All I had encountered I detailed, all I had
recognised, heard, and seen; how I had beheld and watched himself: how
I listened, how much heard, what conjectured; the whole history, in
brief, summoned to his confidence, rushed thither, truthful, literal,
ardent, bitter.

Still as I narrated, instead of checking, he incited me to proceed he
spurred me by the gesture, the smile, the half-word. Before I had half
done, he held both my hands, he consulted my eyes with a most piercing
glance: there was something in his face which tended neither to calm
nor to put me down; he forgot his own doctrine, he forsook his own
system of repression when I most challenged its exercise. I think I
deserved strong reproof; but when have we our deserts? I merited
severity; he looked indulgence. To my very self I seemed imperious and
unreasonable, for I forbade Justine Marie my door and roof; he smiled,
betraying delight. Warm, jealous, and haughty, I knew not till now that
my nature had such a mood: he gathered me near his heart. I was full of
faults; he took them and me all home. For the moment of utmost mutiny,
he reserved the one deep spell of peace. These words caressed my ear:--

"Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on
earth."

We walked back to the Rue Fossette by moonlight--such moonlight as fell
on Eden--shining through the shades of the Great Garden, and haply
gilding a path glorious for a step divine--a Presence nameless. Once in
their lives some men and women go back to these first fresh days of our
great Sire and Mother--taste that grand morning's dew--bathe in its
sunrise.

In the course of the walk I was told how Justine Marie Sauveur had
always been regarded with the affection proper to a daughter--how, with
M. Paul's consent, she had been affianced for months to one Heinrich
Muehler, a wealthy young German merchant, and was to be married in the
course of a year. Some of M. Emanuel's relations and connections would,
indeed, it seems, have liked him to marry her, with a view to securing
her fortune in the family; but to himself the scheme was repugnant, and
the idea to