range of his vision.

Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral
associations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now
that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of
saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however,
to see it once more, to pass with head aloft beneath the garrets where
he had once dreamed as a student, fagging and striving to get knowledge.
How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar
flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by
the open window, the passage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with
its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending
to his window like the echo of a prayer!

In the recess during one of the years following his election to the
Assembly, he married Mademoiselle Gerard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian,
charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not
hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted
Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this
good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Grenoble, not
excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With
large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full
beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving
to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat
contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was
not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable,
refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and
alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a
young girl a perfect passion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had
sought her from love.

And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his
heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged;
he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of
Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all
anxieties of the present, the routine life of the Assembly into which he
plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates
and his duties.

Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his
wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a
journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old h