ties.

When they were lying down in the middle of the field, he would stretch
himself out with his head on her lap, under the shelter of her parasol;
or else with their faces turned towards the green sward, in the centre
of which they rested, they kept gazing towards one another so that their
pupils seemed to intermingle, thirsting for one another and ever
satiating their thirst, and then with half-closed eyelids they lay side
by side without uttering a single word.

Now and then the distant rolling of a drum reached their ears. It was
the signal-drum which was being beaten in the different villages calling
on people to go and defend Paris.

"Oh! look here! 'tis the rising!" said Frederick, with a disdainful
pity, all this excitement now presenting to his mind a pitiful aspect by
the side of their love and of eternal nature.

And they talked about whatever happened to come into their heads, things
that were perfectly familiar to them, persons in whom they took no
interest, a thousand trifles. She chatted with him about her chambermaid
and her hairdresser. One day she was so self-forgetful that she told him
her age--twenty-nine years. She was becoming quite an old woman.

Several times, without intending it, she gave him some particulars with
reference to her own life. She had been a "shop girl," had taken a trip
to England, and had begun studying for the stage; all this she told
without any explanation of how these changes had come about; and he
found it impossible to reconstruct her entire history.

She related to him more about herself one day when they were seated side
by side under a plane-tree at the back of a meadow. At the road-side,
further down, a little barefooted girl, standing amid a heap of dust,
was making a cow go to pasture. As soon as she caught sight of them she
came up to beg, and while with one hand she held up her tattered
petticoat, she kept scratching with the other her black hair, which,
like a wig of Louis XIV.'s time, curled round her dark face, lighted by
a magnificent pair of eyes.

"She will be very pretty by-and-by," said Frederick.

"How lucky she is, if she has no mother!" remarked Rosanette.

"Eh? How is that?"

"Certainly. I, if it were not for mine----"

She sighed, and began to speak about her childhood. Her parents were
weavers in the Croix-Rousse. She acted as an apprentice to her father.
In vain did the poor man wear himself out with hard work; his wife was
continually