am dreaming. Where am I?"

"You!" I retorted, "you, madame, who are easily excited, and who,
understanding so well the most imperceptible emotions, are able to
cultivate in a man's heart the most delicate of sentiments, without
crushing it, without shattering it at the very outset, you who have
compassion for the tortures of the heart, and who, with the wit of the
Parisian, combine a passionate temperament worthy of Spain or Italy----"

She realized that my words were heavily charged with bitter irony; and,
thereupon, without seeming to notice it, she interrupted me to say:

"Oh! you describe me to suit your own taste. A strange kind of tyranny!
You wish me not to be _myself_!"

"Oh! I wish nothing," I cried, alarmed by the severity of her manner.
"At all events, it is true, is it not, that you like to hear stories of
the fierce passions, kindled in our heart by the enchanting women of the
South?"

"Yes. And then?"

"Why, I will come to your house about nine o'clock to-morrow evening,
and elucidate this mystery for you."

"No," she replied, with a pout; "I wish it done now."

"You have not yet given me the right to obey you when you say, 'I wish
it.'"

"At this moment," she said, with an exhibition of coquetry of the sort
that drives men to despair, "I have a most violent desire to know this
secret. To-morrow it may be that I will not listen to you."

She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as
ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young
aide-de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving, and
jealous.

"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two
o'clock in the morning.

"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more
capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."

The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty
little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet, looking
up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft light. It
was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of those moments
which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in peace and
longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of regret, even
when we are happier. What can efface the deep imprint of the first
solicitations of love?

"Go on," she said. "I am listening."

"But I dare not begin. There are passages in the story which are
dangerous to the narrator. If I becom