having followed her.

"For, after all," said he to himself, "if she really wished to avoid me
and put me off her track, it is because she loves me. With women of that
stamp, coyness is a proof of love. Well, if I had carried the adventure
any further, it would, perhaps, have ended in disgust. I will sleep in
peace."

The Count was in the habit of analyzing his keenest sensations, as men
do involuntarily when they have as much brains as heart, and he was
surprised when he saw the strange damsel of the Rue Froid-Manteau once
more, not in the pictured splendor of his dream but in the bare reality
of dreary fact. And, in spite of it all, if fancy had stripped the woman
of her livery of misery, it would have spoilt her for him; for he wanted
her, he longed for her, he loved her--with her muddy stockings, her
slipshod feet, her straw bonnet! He wanted her in the very house where
he had seen her go in.

"Am I bewitched by vice, then?" he asked himself in dismay. "Nay, I
have not yet reached that point. I am but three-and-twenty, and there is
nothing of the senile fop about me."

The very vehemence of the whim that held possession of him to some
extent reassured him. This strange struggle, these reflections, and this
love in pursuit may perhaps puzzle some persons who are accustomed
to the ways of Paris life; but they may be reminded that Count Andrea
Marcosini was not a Frenchman.

Brought up by two abbes, who, in obedience to a very pious father, had
rarely let him out of their sight, Andrea had not fallen in love with a
cousin at the age of eleven, or seduced his mother's maid by the time
he was twelve; he had not studied at school, where a lad does not learn
only, or best, the subjects prescribed by the State; he had lived in
Paris but a few years, and he was still open to those sudden but deep
impressions against which French education and manners are so strong a
protection. In southern lands a great passion is often born of a
glance. A gentleman of Gascony who had tempered strong feelings by much
reflection had fortified himself by many little recipes against sudden
apoplexies of taste and heart, and he advised the Count to indulge at
least once a month in a wild orgy to avert those storms of the soul
which, but for such precautions, are apt to break out at inappropriate
moments. Andrea now remembered this advice.

"Well," thought he, "I will begin to-morrow, January 1st."

This explains why Count Andrea Marc