e young girl with a faint smile, adding: "It
is nothing."

"What an imprudent child you are!" said Dorsenne in his tone of friendly
scolding. "Do you know that you might have severed an artery and have
caused a very serious, perhaps a fatal, hemorrhage?"

"That would not have been such a great misfortune," replied Alba, shaking
her pretty head with an expression so bitter about her mouth that the
young man, too, ceased smiling.

"Do not speak in that tone," said he, "or I shall think you did it
purposely."

"Purposely?" repeated the young girl. "Purposely? Why should I have done
it purposely?"

And she blushed and laughed in the same nervous way she had laughed
fifteen minutes before, when she looked down into the street. Dorsenne
felt that she was suffering, and his heart contracted. The trouble
against which he had struggled for several days with all the energy of an
independent artist, and which for some time systematized his celibacy,
again oppressed him. He thought it time to put between "folly" and him
the irreparability of his categorical resolution. So he replied to his
little friend with his habitual gentleness, but in a tone of firmness,
which already announced his determination:

"I have again vexed you, Contessina, and you are looking at me with the
glance of our hours of dispute. You will later regret having been unkind
to-day."

As he pronounced those enigmatical words, she saw that he had in his eyes
and in his smile something different and indefinable. It must have been
that she loved him still more than she herself believed as for a second
she forgot both her pain and her resolution, and she asked him, quickly:

"You have some trouble? You are suffering? What is it?"

"Nothing," replied Dorsenne. "But time is flying, the minutes are going
by, and not only the minutes. There is an old and charming. French ode,
which you do not know and which begins:

'Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, Madame.
Las, le temps? Non. Mais nous nous en allons.'"

"Which means, little Countess, in simple prose, that this is no doubt the
last conversation we shall have together this season, and that it would
be cruel to mar for me this last visit."

"Do I understand you aright?" said Alba. She, too, knew too well Julien's
way of speaking not to know that that mannerism, half-mocking,
half-sentimental, always served him to prepare phrases more grave, and
against the emotion of which her fear of appearin