the last foundations of my broken
strength, and my old eyes are dimmed with tears.

The remainder of her life was passed in a little chateau near Sevres,
where Mademoiselle Mars had made arrangements for her reception. She
lingered for three years, and died out, like one exhausted. As for me,
I worked as a laborer in the garden of the chateau to the day of her
death; and although I never saw her, the one thought that I was still
near her sustained and supported me,--not, indeed, with hope, for I had
long ceased to hope.

I knew the window of the room she sat in; and when, at evening, I left
the garden, I knew it was the time she walked there. These were the
two thoughts that filled up all my mind; and out of these grew the
day-dreams in which my hours were passed. Still fresh as yesterday
within my heart are the sensations with which I marked a slight change
in the curtain of her window, or bent over the impress of her foot upon
the gravel. How passionately have I kissed the flowers that I hoped she
might have plucked! how devotedly knelt beside the stalks from which she
had broken off a blossom!

These memories live still, nor would I wish it otherwise. In the tender
melancholy, I can sit and ponder over the past, more tranquilly, may be,
than if they spoke of happiness.

CHAPTER XLV. DARK PASSAGES OF LIFE

For some years after the death of Margot, my life was like a restless
dream,--a struggle, as it were, between reality and a strange scepticism
with everything and every one. At moments a wish would seize me to
push my fortune in the world,--to become rich and powerful; and then as
suddenly would I fall back upon my poverty as the condition least open
to great reverses, and hug myself in the thought that my obscurity was
a shield against adverse fortune. I tried to school my mind to a
misanthropy that might throw me still more upon myself; but I could not.
Even in my isolated, friendless condition, I loved to contemplate the
happiness of others. I could watch children for hours long at their
play; and if the sounds of laughter or pleasant revelry came from a
house as I passed at nightfall, my heart beat responsively to every note
of joy, and in my spirit I was in the midst of them. I had neither
home nor country, and my heart yearned for both. I felt the void like a
desert, bleak and desolate, within me; and it was in vain I endeavored,
by a hundred artifices, to make me suffice to myself. I came, at lengt