ith his aunt, whom he
admires." She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of
Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre
liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo,
the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic
refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting that she
had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her lamp and went to
sleep.

She dreamed that she met in a deserted church Robert Le Menil enveloped
in furs which she had never seen him wear. He was waiting for her, but a
crowd of priests had separated them. She did not know what had become of
him. She had not seen his face, and that frightened her. She awoke and
heard at the open window a sad, monotonous cry, and saw a humming-bird
darting about in the light of early dawn. Then, without cause, she began
to weep in a passion of self-pity, and with the abandon of a child.

CHAPTER XI

"THE DAWN OF FAITH AND LOVE"

She took pleasure in dressing early, with delicate and subtle taste. Her
dressing-room, an aesthetic fantasy of Vivian Bell, with its coarsely
varnished pottery, its tall copper pitchers, and its faience pavement,
like a chess-board, resembled a fairy's kitchen. It was rustic and
marvellous, and the Countess Martin could have in it the agreeable
surprise of mistaking herself for a fairy. While her maid was dressing
her hair, she heard Dechartre and Choulette talking under her windows.
She rearranged all the work Pauline had done, and uncovered the line of
her nape, which was fine and pure. She looked at herself in the glass,
and went into the garden.

Dechartre was there, reciting verses of Dante, and looking at Florence:
"At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh. . ."

Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs
hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of
Misery on his stick.

Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle: "At the hour when our mind,
a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of
thoughts, is almost divine in its visions, . . . ."

She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and dressed in
a straw-colored gown. The faint sunlight of winter enveloped her in pale
gold.

Dechartre greeted her joyfully.

She said:

"You are reciting verses that I do not know. I know only Metastasio. My
teacher liked o