the Seine on holidays for a distance
of ten miles.

During the week she saw shabbily-dressed idlers sauntering along the
shore, men in broad-brimmed straw hats and flannel shirts, women who sat
on the worn grass of the sloping bank, doing nothing, with the dreamy
eyes of a cow at pasture. All the peddlers, handorgans, harpists;
travelling jugglers, stopped there as at a quarantine station. The quay
was crowded with them, and as they approached, the windows in the little
houses near by were always thrown open, disclosing white
dressing-jackets, half-buttoned, heads of dishevelled hair, and an
occasional pipe, all watching these paltry strolling shows, as if with a
sigh of regret for Paris, so near at hand. It was a hideous and
depressing sight.

The grass, which had hardly begun to grow, was already turning yellow
beneath the feet of the crowd. The dust was black; and yet, every
Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the
Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions.
All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and
then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a great deal about Asnieres
from the illustrious Delobelle, who would have liked to have, like so
many of his profession, a little villa in those latitudes, a cozy nook in
the country to which to return by the midnight train, after the play is
done.

All these dreams of little Chebe, Sidonie Risler had realized.

The brothers went to the gate opening on the quay, in which the key was
usually left. They entered, making their way among trees and shrubs of
recent growth. Here and there the billiard-room, the gardener's lodge, a
little greenhouse, made their appearance, like the pieces of one of the
Swiss chalets we give to children to play with; all very light and
fragile, hardly more than resting on the ground, as if ready to fly away
at the slightest breath of bankruptcy or caprice: the villa of a cocotte
or a pawnbroker.

Frantz looked about in some bewilderment. In the distance, opening on a
porch surrounded by vases of flowers, was the salon with its long blinds
raised. An American easy-chair, folding-chairs, a small table from which
the coffee had not been removed, could be seen near the door. Within they
heard a succession of loud chords on the piano and the murmur of low
voices.

"I tell you Sidonie will be surprised," said honest Risler, walking
softly on the gravel; "she doesn't exp