a gilt key, the sign
of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to
her. Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant
with a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard
covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the
janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a
green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house. A sculptor's studio
backed on it its glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep
in the dust. At the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of
monuments, broken bases of columnettes. In the rear, the house, not very
large, showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and
rosebushes.

Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the
fifteenth century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the
characteristics of a private house of the time of Louis XII. That house,
begun in the middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished. The
builder of so many castles died without being able to finish his own
house. It was better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its
distinction and its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish,
having lost little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now
between the walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little
house, by the roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its
windows, by the simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had
caused to be covered with little expense, by all the lucky accidents of
the unfinished and unpremeditated, corrected the lack of grace of its
new and affected antiquity and archeologic romanticism, and harmonized
with the humbleness of a district made ugly by progress of population.

In fine, notwithstanding its appearance of ruin and its green drapery,
that little house had its charm. Suddenly and instinctively, Therese
discovered in it other harmonies. In the elegant negligence which
extended from the walls covered with vines to the darkened panes of the
studio, and even in the bent tree, the bark of which studded with its
shells the wild grass of the courtyard, she divined the mind of the
master, nonchalant, not skilful in preserving, living in the long
solitude of passionate men. She had in her joy a sort of grief at
observing this careless state in which her lover left things around
him. She found in it a sort of grace and nobility, but also a s