l. She comes, she goes, she laughs,
she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at
her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon
to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend
entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the
house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself,
painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly.
There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the
glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this
moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed
upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which
makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who
tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the
room that morning."

"What then?" I asked, as he paused.

"My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable
imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror
hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the
man he was with the man he had been. He never told me and I never asked
what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too
culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have
been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through
his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved?
Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had
never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it?
I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one
whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the
purity, the soul of a man of twenty."

A few hours after this conversation, I found myself once more in the
office of the Boulevard, seated in Pascal's den, and he was saying,
"Already? Have you accomplished your interview with Pierre Fauchery?"

"He would not even receive me," I replied, boldly.

"What did I tell you?" he sneered, shrugging his big shoulders. "We'll get
even with him on his next volume. But you know, Labarthe, as long as you
continue to have that innocent look about you, you can't expect to succeed
in newspaper work."

I bore with the ill-humor of my chief. What would he have said if he had
known that