lept together.

Thus began Miss Blondeau, with the air of Fiammetta telling her
prettiest story to the Florentines in the garden of Boccaccio.

Antoine and Emile were preparing to enter the Church; indeed, they had
taken the preliminary steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed
the color of their lives. A foreign lady, from some nameless island in
the Pacific, had a few months before moved into their neighborhood. The
lady died suddenly, leaving a girl of sixteen or seventeen, entirely
friendless and unprovided for. The young men had been kind to the woman
during her illness, and at her death--melting with pity at the forlorn
situation of Anglice, the daughter--swore between themselves to love and
watch over her as if she were their sister.

Now Anglice had a wild, strange beauty that made other women seem tame
beside her; and in the course of time the young men found themselves
regarding their ward not so much like brothers as at first. In brief,
they found themselves in love with her.

They struggled with their hopeless passion month after month, neither
betraying his secret to the other; for the austere orders which they
were about to assume precluded the idea of love and marriage. Until then
they had dwelt in the calm air of religious meditations, unmoved except
by that pious fervor which in other ages taught men to brave the
tortures of the rack and to smile amid the flames. But a blonde girl,
with great eyes and a voice like the soft notes of a vesper hymn, had
come in between them and their ascetic dreams of heaven. The ties that
had bound the young men together snapped silently one by one. At last
each read in the pale face of the other the story of his own despair.

And she? If Anglice shared their trouble, her face told no story. It was
like the face of a saint on a cathedral window. Once, however, as she
came suddenly upon the two men and overheard words that seemed to burn
like fire on the lip of the speaker, her eyes grew luminous for an
instant. Then she passed on, her face as immobile as before in its
setting of wavy gold hair.

"Entre or et roux Dieu fit ses longs cheveux."

One night Emile and Anglice were missing. They had flown--but whither,
nobody knew, and nobody save Antoine cared. It was a heavy blow to
Antoine--for he had himself half resolved to confess his love to Anglice
and urge her to fly with him.

A strip of paper slipped from a volume on Antoine's _priedieu_, and
flu