your
face."

I obeyed. She gazed at me searchingly, then withdrew her head again.
Reappearing very soon, she said: "Madame has decided to trust you. These
are her apartments. There is a door from a gallery where pictures
hang--"

"I have been to that gallery," I interrupted, "but I was watched while
there. Is there no other way?"

She thought a moment. "Yes, the garden. At the foot of the terrace, turn
to the right, till you get to the end of this wing."

"But the man at the steps yonder will stop me. He has done so already."

"That beast! Alas, yes! Well, I will go and talk with him, and keep him
looking at me. You go down to the terrace without attracting any
attention, walk close to the house till you get to this end of the
balustrade, step over the balustrade, descend the bank as quietly as
possible, and wait behind the shrubbery near the door at the end of this
wing,--it's the door from Madame's apartments to the garden. Do you
understand?"

"Perfectly."

"Then I will be talking to that man by the time you can get to the
terrace. I go at once. Be quick, Monsieur,--and careful."

Admiring the swift wits and decision of the girl, I hastened through the
corridor, down the stairs, and into the hall. The Count and the
long-nosed man were so buried in their game that neither looked up. A
pair of varlets in attendance were yawning on a bench. Yawning in
imitation, I passed with feigned listlessness to the terrace, went
noiselessly along by the house-wall, and followed the wing to the end of
the balustrade. I did not venture even to look toward the steps, but I
could hear the maid talking and laughing coquettishly. I crossed the
balustrade by sitting on it and swinging my legs over: then strode on
light feet down the grassy bank and through an opening in the shrubbery
I saw at my right. I found myself in a walk which, bordered all the way
by shrubbery, ran from a narrow door in the end of the wing to the other
extremity of the garden. The door, when I first glanced at it, was
slightly ajar: I supposed the maid had left it so. But as soon as I had
come to a halt in the walk, the door opened, and a very young, very
slender, very sad-faced, very beautiful lady came out, with eyes turned
upon me in a mixture of hope and fear.

I instinctively fell upon my knee before that picture of grief and
beauty. She wore, I remember, a gown of faded blue, and blue was the
colour of her eyes--a soft, fair blue, like that of the