parasols or floating feathers, made vivid
patches of color against the green background of the gardens, and the
streets were now and then touched into picturesqueness by the passing of
some half-dozen peasants who had come from the neighboring villages to
sell their butter or their eggs. The men in their blue blouses were
mostly lean, dark, and taciturn; the women, small, black-eyed, and
vivacious, with bright-colored petticoats, long earrings, and the
quaintest of round white caps. The silvery whiteness of the lake,
flashing back an answer to the sunlight, gave a peculiarly joyous
radiance to the scene. For water is to a landscape what the eye is to
the human countenance: it gives life and expression; without it, the
most beautiful features may be blank and uninteresting.

But the brightness of the scene did not find an echo in every heart.

"Dame!" said a French waiter, who stood, napkin in hand, at a window of
the Hotel Venat, watching the passers-by, "there they go, that cold,
sullen English pair, looking as if nothing on earth would make them
smile again!"

A bullet-headed little man in a white apron stepped up to the window and
stared in the direction that Auguste's eyes had taken.

"Tiens, donc! Quelle tournure! But she is superb!" he exclaimed, as if
in remonstrance.

"She is handsome--oui, sans doute; but see how she frowns! I like a
woman who smiles, who coquettes, who knows how to divert herself--like
Mademoiselle Lisette here, queen of my heart and life."

And Auguste bowed sentimentally to a pretty little chambermaid who came
tripping up the stairs at that moment, and laid his hand upon his heart.

"You are too polite, Monsieur Auguste," Lisette responded amicably. "And
at whom are you gazing so earnestly?"

"At the belle Anglaise--you can still see her, if you look--she is
charmingly dressed, but----"

"She is magnificent! simply magnificent," murmured the bullet-headed
Jean, who was not, like his friend, enamored of the pert Lisette. "I
have never seen so splendid an Englishwoman, never! nor one who had so
much the true Parisian air!"

Lisette uttered a shrill little scream of laughter. "Do you know the
reason, mon ami? She is not English at all: she is a compatriot. He--the
husband--_he_ is English; but she is French, I tell you, French to the
finger-tips."

"Voyons; what rooms have they?"

"They are au quatrieme--they are poor--poor," said Lisette, with
infinite scorn. "I wait on them a l