e," murmured Joyselle, pressing her hand
close to his side. When she had left the inn arm-in-arm with him, she
had felt as though they must look perilously like a German bride and
groom, but there was in his old-fashioned bearing as he guided her
through the streets a kind of chivalrous courtesy that she liked, and
she began to feel like a princess being presented to his people by her
lord.

"There is their house. I gave it to them twenty-five years ago. It is
their palace, their country-place, their world, to my old people."

Through a half-door in the opposite wall the girl could just catch a
glimpse of the left side of the house. It was hung with trumpet flowers.

Beyond, a clearly defined square of moonlight showed her a smooth patch
of lawn, beyond which the side of a creeper-clad arbour blocked the
view.

"The dinner is to be in the garden; they are to sit in the arbour, and
there will be many narrow tables all over the lawn, which is rather
large behind the house. They are very much interested in it; all of us
will be there, and our children, and--theirs. I am old, ma Brigitte----"

His voice fell sadly as this idea occurred to him, and she pressed his
arm and smiled up at him, her face ruddy in the gaslight.

"You are young, my man; you will never grow old. And you will play at
the dinner? And you will play to me? I always know when you play to me."

"Yes, for it is always. You are good to me now, _bien-aimee_."

His gentleness was wonderfully appealing, as it always was to her. The
long respite from nerve-racking misunderstandings had allowed her to see
more clearly the real beauty of his faulty character, and a wave of
compunction came over her as she thought how little she, with her bad
qualities of jealousy, selfishness and cruelty, deserved this beautiful
love.

For she fully understood that only a deep, real love could so vanquish
the lower part of his nature as to let the nobler triumph as it had of
late.

"I adore you, my great man," she said, very low, and their eyes met.

Then they crossed the street and he, leaning over the closed half of the
door in the wall, opened it and they went in.

It was nine o'clock, and the old people had had their supper. Brigit who
had, thinking of their great age, rather expected to find them more or
less mummy-like, sitting in comfortable chairs tended by a middle-aged
relation, was somewhat amused to find them squabbling fiercely over a
game of dominoes, e