sympathy between you two; but he bears no malice; I tell you frankly
he pays no great heed to you ... nor to me. He thinks only of his own
affairs and his own pleasures."

She stepped towards the shrubberies surrounding the _Belle Lilloise_,
and he followed her with something of repugnance, knowing it to be the
trysting-place of mercenary lovers and amours of a day. She selected the
table furthest out of sight.

"How many things I have to tell you, Evariste. Friendship has its
rights; you do not forbid me to exercise them? I have much to say about
you ... and something about myself, if you will let me."

The landlord having brought a carafe of lemonade, she filled their
glasses herself with the air of a careful housewife; then she began to
tell him about her childhood, described her mother's beauty, which she
loved to dilate upon both as a tribute to the latter's memory and as
the source of her own good looks, and boasted of her grandparents'
sturdy vigour, for she was proud of her bourgeois blood. She related how
at sixteen she had lost this mother she adored and had entered on a life
without anyone to love or rely upon. She painted herself as she was, a
vehement, passionate nature, full of sensibility and courage, and
concluded:

"Oh, Evariste, my girlhood was so sad and lonely I cannot but know what
a prize is a heart like yours, and I will not surrender, I give you fair
warning, of my own free will and without an effort to retain it, a
sympathy on which I trusted I might count and which I held dear."

Evariste gazed at her tenderly.

"Can it be, Elodie, that I am not indifferent to you? Can I really
think...?"

He broke off, fearing to say too much and thereby betray so trusting a
friendliness.

She gave him a little confiding hand that half-peeped out of the long
narrow sleeve with its lace frillings. Her bosom rose and fell in
long-drawn sighs.

"Credit me, Evariste, with all the sentiments you would have me feel for
you, and you will not be mistaken in the dispositions of my heart."

"Elodie, Elodie, you say that? will you still say it when you know
..."--he hesitated.

She dropped her eyes; and he finished the sentence in a whisper:

"... when you know I love you?"

As she heard the declaration, she blushed,--with pleasure. Yet, while
her eyes still spoke of a tender ecstasy, a quizzical smile flickered in
spite of herself about one corner of her lips. She was thinking:

"And he imagines he pr