ts to this,
bringing these dainties, and following up the little victories that
he set himself to gain over Stephanie's instincts (the last gleam
of intelligence in her), until he succeeded to some extent--she grew
_tamer_ than ever before. Every morning the colonel went into the park;
and if, after a long search for the Countess, he could not discover the
tree in which she was rocking herself gently, nor the nook where she
lay crouching at play with some bird, nor the roof where she had perched
herself, he would whistle the well-known air _Partant pour la Syrie_,
which recalled old memories of their love, and Stephanie would run
towards him lightly as a fawn. She saw the colonel so often that she was
no longer afraid of him; before very long she would sit on his knee with
her thin, lithe arms about him. And while thus they sat as lovers love
to do, Philip doled out sweetmeats one by one to the eager Countess.
When they were all finished, the fancy often took Stephanie to search
through her lover's pockets with a monkey's quick instinctive dexterity,
till she had assured herself that there was nothing left, and then she
gazed at Philip with vacant eyes; there was no thought, no gratitude in
their clear depths. Then she would play with him. She tried to take off
his boots to see his foot; she tore his gloves to shreds, and put on his
hat; and she would let him pass his hands through her hair, and take her
in his arms, and submit passively to his passionate kisses, and at last,
if he shed tears, she would gaze silently at him.

She quite understood the signal when he whistled _Partant pour la
Syrie_, but he could never succeed in inducing her to pronounce her
own name--_Stephanie_. Philip persevered in his heart-rending task,
sustained by a hope that never left him. If on some bright autumn
morning he saw her sitting quietly on a bench under a poplar tree, grown
brown now as the season wore, the unhappy lover would lie at her feet
and gaze into her eyes as long as she would let him gaze, hoping that
some spark of intelligence might gleam from them. At times he lent
himself to an illusion; he would imagine that he saw the hard,
changeless light in them falter, that there was a new life and softness
in them, and he would cry, "Stephanie! oh, Stephanie! you hear me, you
see me, do you not?"

But for her the sound of his voice was like any other sound, the
stirring of the wind in the trees, or the lowing of the cow on which