l. He had done what no beautiful woman in France could
do--weakened her grasp upon Ralph Flare's heart. For now Ralph's old
enthusiasm for his profession reasserted itself. It was his first and
deepest love after all.

"My baby," he said one night, "there was a great artist named
Raphael--and he had a little mistress, whom I don't think a whit
prettier than mine. She was called the _Fornarina_, just as you may be
called the _Coutouriere_, and he painted her portrait in the characters
of saints and of the Virgin. She will be remembered a thousand years,
because Raphael so loved and painted her. But he was not a great artist
only because he loved the _Fornarina_. He had something that he loved
better, and so have I."

"One more beloved than Suzette?" she cried.

"Yes! it is art. I loved you more than my art before; but I am going
back to my first love."

Suzette tossed her head and said that she could never be jealous of a
picture, and went her way with a simple faith and toiled; and as she
toiled the more, so grew her love the purer and her content the more
equal. She was not the aerial thing she had been. Retaining her
elasticity of spirit, she was less volatile, more silent, more careful,
more anxious.

It is wiser, not happier, to reach that estate called thought; for now
she asked herself very often how long this chapter of her life would
last. Must the time come when he must leave her forever? She thought it
the bitterest of all to part as they had done before, with anger; but
any parting must be agony where she had loved so well. As he lay
sleeping, he never knew what tears of midnight were plashing upon his
face. He could not see how her little heart was bleeding as it throbbed.
Yet she went right on, though sometimes the tears blinded her, till she
could not see her needle; but the consciousness that this love and labor
had made her life more sanctified was, in some sort, compensation.

One Sunday she rose before Ralph, and thinking that she was unobserved,
stole out of the hotel and up the Boulevard. He followed her,
suspiciously. She crossed the Place de la Sorbonne, turned the transept
of the Pantheon, and entered the old church of St. Etienne du Mont.

It was early mass. The tapers which have been burning five hundred years
glistened upon the tomb of the holy St. Genevieve. Here and there old
women and girls were kneeling in the chapels, whispering their sins into
the ears of invisible priests. And be