e entire solar
system, and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as
the sun shines for us all--and then there will be the beginning of
everything. And all through that little episode in the street of
those White Ursulines! And the seed of Barty and Leah will overflow
to the uttermost ends of the earth, and finally blossom and bear
fruit for ever and ever beyond the stars.

"What a beginning for a new order of things! what a getting
up-stairs! what an awakening! what an annunciation!

"Do you remember that knock at the door?

"'Il est dix heures, savez-vous? Voulez-vous votre cafe dans votre
chambre?'

"She little knew, poor little Frau! humble little Finche Torfs,
lowly Flemish virgin, who loved you as the moth loves the star;
vilain mangeur de coeurs que vous etes!

"Barty, I wish your wife to hear nothing of this till the child who
once was your Martia shall have seen the light of day with eyes of
its own; tell her that I have left you at last, but don't tell her
why or how; tell her some day, years hence, if you think she will
love me the better for it; not otherwise.

"When you wake, Barty, I shall still be inside you; say to me in
your mezza voce all the kind things you can think of--such things as
you would have said to your mother had she lived till now, and you
were speeding her on a long and uncertain journey.

"How you would have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and
of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's,
her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was
tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's
mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me
of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French;
those droll, quick gestures and quaint intonations, that ease and
freedom and deftness as you move! And then you become English in a
moment, and your big, burly, fair-haired father has come back with
his high voice, and his high spirits, and his frank blue eyes, like
yours, so kind and brave and genial.

"And _you_, dear, what a baby you were--a very prince among babies;
ah! if I can only be like that when I begin again!

"The people in the Tuileries garden used to turn round and stare and
smile at you when Rosalie with the long blue stream