pirit of
indifference contrary to her own nature, opposite to the interested
and careful mind of the Montessuys. At once she thought that, without
spoiling the pensive softness of that rough corner, she would bring to
it her well-ordered activity; she would have sand thrown in the alley,
and in the angle wherein a little sunlight came she would put the gayety
of flowers. She looked sympathetically at a statue which had come there
from some park, a Flora, lying on the earth, eaten by black moss, her
two arms lying by her sides. She thought of raising her soon, of making
of her a centrepiece for a fountain. Dechartre, who for an hour had
been watching for her coming, joyful, anxious, trembling in his agitated
happiness, descended the steps. In the fresh shade of the vestibule,
wherein she divined confusedly the severe splendor of bronze and marble
statues, she stopped, troubled by the beatings of her heart, which
throbbed with all its might in her chest. He pressed her in his arms and
kissed her. She heard him, through the tumult of her temples, recalling
to her the short delights of the day before. She saw again the lion
of the Atlas on the carpet, and returned to Jacques his kisses with
delicious slowness. He led her, by a wooden stairway, into the vast hall
which had served formerly as a workshop, where he designed and modelled
his figures, and, above all, read; he liked reading as if it were opium.

Pale-tinted Gothic tapestries, which let one perceive in a marvellous
forest a lady at the feet of whom a unicorn lay on the grass, extended
above cabinets to the painted beams of the ceiling. He led her to
a large and low divan, loaded with cushions covered with sumptuous
fragments of Spanish and Byzantine cloaks; but she sat in an armchair.
"You are here! You are here! The world may come to an end."

She replied "Formerly I thought of the end of the world, but I was not
afraid of it. Monsieur Lagrange had promised it to me, and I was waiting
for it. When I did not know you, I felt so lonely." She looked at the
tables loaded with vases and statuettes, the tapestries, the confused
and splendid mass of weapons, the animals, the marbles, the paintings,
the ancient books. "You have beautiful things."

"Most of them come from my father, who lived in the golden age of
collectors. These histories of the unicorn, the complete series of which
is at Cluny, were found by my father in 1851 in an inn."

But, curious and disappointe