you imagine. What
there was rare and excellent in the liaison came from you. Well then,
nothing is lost, since the source still remains. Your eyes, which have
thrown a glamour of the fairest hues over, I doubt not, a very ordinary
individual, will not cease to go on shedding abroad elsewhere the same
bright rays of charming self-delusion."

My good master said more in the same strain, dropping from his lips the
finest words ever heard anent the tribulations of the senses and the
errors lovers are prone to. But, as he talked on, Sophie, who for some
while had let her pretty head droop on the shoulder of this best of men,
fell softly asleep. When M. l'Abbe Coignard saw his young friend
was wrapped in a sound slumber, he congratulated himself on having
discoursed in a vein so meet to afford repose and peace to a suffering
soul.

"It must be allowed," he chuckled, "my sermons have a beneficent
effect."

Not to disturb Mademoiselle's slumbers, he took a thousand pretty
precautions, amongst others constraining himself to talk on
uninterruptedly, not unreasonably apprehensive that a sudden silence
might awake her.

"Tournebroche, my son," he said, turning to me, "look, all her sorrows
are vanished away with the consciousness she had of them. You must see
they were all of the imagination and resided in her own thought.
You must understand likewise they sprang from a certain pride and
overweening conceit that goes along with love and makes it very
exacting. For, in truth, if only we loved in humbleness of spirit and
forgetfulness of self, or merely with a simple heart, we should be
content with what is vouchsafed us and should not straightway cry
treason when some slight is put on us. And if some power of loving were
left us still, after our lover had deserted us, we should await the
issue in calmness of mind to make what use of it God should please to
grant."

But the day was just breaking by this time, and the song of the birds
grew so loud it drowned my good master's voice. He made no complaint on
this score.

"Hearken," he said, "to the sparrows. They make love more wisely than
men do."

Sophie awoke in the white light of dawn, and I admired her lovely eyes,
which fatigue and grief had ringed with a delicate pearly-grey.
She seemed somewhat reconciled to life, and did not refuse a cup of
chocolate which my good master made her drink at Mathurine's door, the
pretty chocolate-seller of the Halles.

But as the poor