nivers t'abandonne!

It would seem as if he could not but remember how they had often sung
and played it together in their golden youth, and the secret, tender
meaning they had affixed to it, known only to themselves. And
Francezka, in her unhappy time, had often played that air upon the
harpsichord as recalling her lost love. But Gaston only shook his
head.

"It is gone from me with other things--the sweetest recollections--the
sacredest memories--never to return."

"When you begin to play the guitar once more, as you used," said
Francezka gently, and smiling, to encourage him, "all these songs will
come back to you again."

Gaston raised his right hand, brown and sinewy.

"This hand looks to be the same it was when I gave it you," he said,
smiling back sadly at Francezka, "but, like my memory, it is not what
it once was. I can neither play the guitar nor write, nor do anything
with it as I once did."

It was sad to see so young a man in the full vigor of manhood with
these cruel marks of mental and physical suffering left upon him, but
on the whole, few men living could at that moment reckon themselves
happier than Gaston Cheverny. If he had suffered he had certainly come
into a royal recompense.

We sat late, and afterward there was dancing in the Diana gallery.
Francezka walked the minuet with Count Saxe, and afterward danced in a
very merry branle. She had danced since Gaston's return, for the first
time in eight years, she told me, having no heart to dance in that
first year, when she was secretly Gaston Cheverny's wife, because he
was away at the wars, and having never seen dancing in those seven
years of sorrow when she waited and longed for him. But she had not
lost either her grace or her gaiety, and danced as she had done in her
first girlhood. Madame Riano did some strange Scotch dances with great
agility in spite of her sixty years, and rated everybody soundly who
could not do the Scotch dances and did not know the Scotch airs.

It was midnight before the company dispersed. I did not go to my
chamber, but driven by some impulse stronger than myself, slipped out
of the chateau and took my way toward a spot sure to be silent and
deserted at this hour--the Italian garden.

A great bright moon rode in the heavens, making the landscape all
black and silver. The yews and box trees were as dark as the darkest
night, and the lake lay in its ever-present gloom shadowed by its sad
cypresses and cedars, wi