ame old
question, "This will turn out badly, of course," he decided. "Once I am
satisfied, disenchantment is inevitable. Oh, well, so much the better,
for with this romance going on I cannot work."

"Miserable me! relapsing--only in mind, alas!--to the age of twenty. I
am waiting for a woman. I who have scorned the doings of lovers for
years and years. I look at my watch every five minutes, and I listen, in
spite of myself, thinking it is her step I hear on the stair.

"No, there is no getting around it. The little blue flower, the
perennial of the soul, is difficult to extirpate, and it keeps growing
up again. It does not show itself for twenty years, and then all of a
sudden, you know not why nor how, it sprouts, and then forth comes a
burst of blossoms. My God! I am getting foolish."

He jumped from his chair. There was a gentle ring. "Not nine o'clock
yet. It isn't she," he murmured, opening the door.

He squeezed her hands and thanked her for being so punctual.

She said she was not feeling well. "I came only because I didn't want to
keep you waiting in vain."

His heart sank.

"I have a fearful headache," she said, passing her gloved hands over her
forehead.

He took her furs and motioned her to the armchair. Prepared to follow
his plan of attack, he sat down on the stool, but she refused the
armchair and took a seat beside the table. Rising, he bent over her and
caught hold of her fingers.

"Your hand is burning," she said.

"Yes, a bit of fever, because I get so little sleep. If you knew how
much I have thought about you! Now I have you here, all to myself," and
he spoke of that persistent odour of cinnamon, faint, distant, expiring
amid the less definite odours which her gloves exhaled, "well," and he
sniffed her fingers, "you will leave some of yourself here when you go
away."

She rose, sighing. "I see you have a cat. What is his name?"

"Mouche."

She called to the cat, which fled precipitately.

"Mouche! Mouche!" Durtal called, but Mouche took refuge under the bed
and refused to come out. "You see he is rather bashful. He has never
seen a woman."

"Oh, would you try to make me think you have never received a woman
here?"

He swore that he never had, that she was the first....

"And you were not really anxious that this--first--should come?"

He blushed. "Why do you say that?"

She made a vague gesture. "I want to tease you," she said, sitting down
in the armchair. "To tell you the