ed up.

"Where did you learn this?" she asked.

I handed her the journal.

"Come in, fellow-student," said she, and held the door wide for me to
enter.

For the second time I found myself in her little _salon_, and found
everything in the self-same order.

"Well," I said, "are you not happy?"

She shook her head.

"Success is not happiness," she replied, smiling mournfully. "That
Beranger should have advocated my poem is an honor beyond price;
but--but I need more than this to make me happy."

And her eyes wandered, with a strange, yearning look, to the sword over
the chimney-piece.

Seeing that look, my heart sank, and the tears sprang unbidden to my
eyes. Whose was the sword? For whose sake was her life so lonely and
secluded? For whom was she waiting? Surely here, if one could but read
it aright, lay the secret of her strange and sudden journeys--here I
touched unawares upon the mystery of her life!

I did not speak. I shaded my face with my hand, and sat looking on the
ground. Then, the silence remaining unbroken, I rose, and examined the
drawings on the walls.

They were water-colors for the most part, and treated in a masterly but
quite peculiar style. The skies were sombre, the foregrounds singularly
elaborate, the color stern and forcible. Angry sunsets barred by lines
of purple cirrus stratus; sweeps of desolate heath bounded by jagged
peaks; steep mountain passes crimson with faded ferns and half-obscured
by rain-clouds; strange studies of weeds, and rivers, and lonely reaches
of desolate sea-shore ... these were some of the subjects, and all were
evidently by the same hand.

"Ah," said Hortense, "you are criticizing my sketches!"

"Your sketches!" I exclaimed. "Are these your work?"

"Certainly," she replied, smiling. "Why not? What do you think of them?"

"What do I think of them! Well, I think that if you had not been a poet
you ought to have been a painter. How fortunate you are in being able to
express yourself so variously! Are these compositions, or studies
from Nature?"

"All studies from Nature--mere records of fact. I do not presume to
create--I am content humbly and from a distance to copy the changing
moods of Nature."

"Pray be your own catalogue, then, and tell me where these places are."

"Willingly. This coast-line with the run of breaking surf was taken on
the shores of Normandy, some few miles from Dieppe. This sunset is a
recollection of a glorious evening near Frankf