portress,
who would have been extremely astonished had she been aware of the
reflections that had just been occupying his mind. He went a short
distance on the highway, then finding, to the right, a road that led to
Cormeilles, he took it, but soon struck into a path that wound through
the woods. He was sorry to leave a spot that spoke vividly to his heart,
and even more so to his imagination. He seated himself on the turf, in
the midst of a grove of oaks; around him stretched a blooming heath.
Through an opening in the grove, he could see Saint-Germain, its
forests, and the Seine glittering in the sunshine, with the two bridges
of Maisons Lafitte spanning it with their arches. Through another
opening he caught a glimpse, to his left, of the proud bastions of
Mont-Valerien, and, in the distance, Paris, the Arc de l'Etoile, the
gilt dome of the Invalides, and the smoke of the factories rising slowly
in the air, then by turns remaining stiff and motionless, or being swept
away by the wind.

The place was retired, solitary, very still. No sound was to be heard
save the singing of a lark, and at intervals the melancholy cry of a
peacock. Abel Larinski was overcome by a mysterious emotion; he felt a
voluptuous languor steal through his veins. He watched the smoke over
Paris, and he saw floating in it an ethereal form whose face was partly
concealed by a red hood. It smiled on him, and he read in this smile a
promise of all the joys of the land of Canaan.

He turned away his eyes, partially closing them, and there appeared
another form to him--in truth, very different from the first. It was
that of a man whom he had known intimately, of a man whom he had deeply
loved. In vain the lark sang aloud, in vain the peacock wailed--Abel
Larinski no longer heard them. He was thinking of a certain Samuel
Brohl; he was reviewing in his mind all the history of this Samuel, a
man who never had had a secret from him. This history was quite as sad a
one as that of Abel Larinski, but much less brilliant, much less heroic.
Samuel Brohl prided himself neither on being a patriot nor a paladin;
his mother had not been a noble woman with the smile of an angel, and
the thought never had occurred to him of fighting for any cause or any
person. He was not a Pole, although born in a Polish province of
the Austrian Empire. His father was a Jew, of German extraction, as
indicated by his name, which signifies a place where one sinks in the
mire, a bo