stood before her, bareheaded, as he often
walked, his eyes unable to hide the pleasure with which he beheld her.

She gave a little gasp.

'You startled me!'

In the dim light he could only see her slight, fluttering smile; and
it seemed to him that she was or had been in agitation. But at least
it was nothing hostile to himself; nay, it was borne in upon him as he
turned his steps, and she walked beside him with a quick yet gradually
subsiding breath, that his appearance had been a relief to her, that
she was glad of his companionship.

And he--miserable fellow!--to him it was peace after struggle, balm
after torment. For his thoughts, as he wandered through the Satory
woods alone, had been the thoughts of a hypochondriac. He hastened to
leave them, now that she was near.

They wandered along the eastern edge of the 'Swiss Water,' towards the
woods amid which the railway runs. Through the gold-and-purple air
the thin autumn trees rose lightly into the evening sky, marching in
ordered ranks beside the water. Young men were fishing in the lake;
boys and children were playing near it, and sweethearts walking in
the dank grass. The evening peace, with its note of decay and death,
seemed to stir feeling rather than soothe it. It set the nerves
trembling.

He began to talk of some pictures he had been studying in the
Palace that day--Nattiers, Rigauds, Drouais--examples of that happy,
sensuous, confident art, produced by a society that knew no doubts of
itself, which not to have enjoyed--so the survivors of it thought--was
to be for ever ignorant of what the charm of life might be.

Fenwick spoke of it with envy and astonishment. The _pleasure_ of it
had penetrated him, its gay, perpetual _festa_--as compared with the
strain of thought and conscience under which the modern lives.

'It gives me a perfect hunger for fine clothes, and jewels, and
masquerades--and "fetes de nuit"--and every sort of theatricality and
expense! Nature has sent us starvelings on the scene a hundred years
late. We are like children in the rain, flattening our noses against a
ballroom window.'

'There were plenty of them then,' said Eugenie. 'But they broke in and
sacked the ballroom.'

'Yes. What folly!' he said, bitterly. 'We are all still groping among
the ruins.'

'No, no! Build a new Palace of Beauty--and bring everybody in--out of
the rain.'

'Ridiculous!' he declared, with sparkling eyes. Art and pleasure were
only for the few