e
background the trees and bushes of the city moat formed an impenetrable
maze of green. The spring air floated into the room in waves. As
Eleanore made her business known, she fixed her enchanted eyes on a
bouquet of lilies of the valley that stood on the table in a bronze
vase.

M. Riviere took a handful of them, and gave them to her. They had not
been cut; they had been pulled up by the roots. Eleanore laughed happily
at the fragrance.

M. Riviere said he was just about to write to his mother in Paris, and
as she was so familiar with the city, she could be of great help to
Eleanore.

Eleanore stepped out on the balcony. "The world is beautiful," she
thought, and smiled at the fruitless efforts of a tiny beetle to climb
up a perpendicular leaf. "Perhaps it was after all merely a dream," she
thought, and thereby consoled herself.

When she returned, Daniel was at her father's. The two men were sitting
in the dark.

Eleanore lighted the lamp. Then she filled a glass with water, and put
the lilies of the valley in it.

"Daniel wants to know why you never visit them any more," said Jordan,
weak and distraught as he now always was. "I told him you were busy at
present with great plans of your own. Well, what does the Frenchman
think about it?"

Eleanore answered her father's question in a half audible voice.

"Go wherever you want to go, child," said Jordan. "You have been
prepared for an independent life in the world for a long while; there is
no doubt about that. God forbid that I should put any hindrances in your
way." He got up with difficulty, and turned toward the door of his room.
Taking hold of the latch, he stopped, and continued in his brooding way:
"It is peculiar that a man can die by inches in a living body; that a
man can have the feeling that he's no longer a part of the present; and
that he can no longer play his role, keep up with his own people, grasp
what is going on about him, or know whether what is to come is good or
evil. It is fearful when a man reaches that stage, fearful--fearful!"

He left the room, shaking his head. To Daniel his words sounded like a
voice from the grave.

They had been silent for a long while, he and Eleanore. Suddenly he
asked gruffly: "Are you serious about going to Paris?"

"Of course I am," she said, "what else can I do?"

He sprang up, and looked angrily into her face: "One has to be ashamed
of one's self," he said, "human language becomes repulsive. Don't