Madame de Mauves

nd Rembrandt. A day or two after the receipt of this friend's letter he took a walk with Madame de Mauves in the forest. They sat down on a fallen log and she began to arrange into a b

ly unwilling to le

his words. "Saint-Germain is pleasant enough, but are you doing yourself justice? Shan't you regret in future days that instead of travelling

e. I'm fond of museums and monuments and of improving my mind, and I'm particularly fond of my friend Webster. But I can't bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without

r, it took her unprepared. "If I strike you as unhappy," she none the l

your courage, your studied gaiety. But I've felt the existence of something beneath them that was more YOU-mor

much too strong. Any 'trouble'-if you mean any unhappiness-that one can sit comfortably talking about is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were examined before a board of commissioners for testing the felicity of mankind I'm sure I should be pronounced a very fortunate woman." There was something that deeply touched

thing I, for one, can say to you; and what I ask of you is not to let me advise or console you, but simply thank you for letting

he Flemish painters can-better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all their worshippers. Go join your friend-see everything, enjoy everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming over with your impressions. I'm extremely fond of t

e Dutch painters," he said with a laugh.

; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely, she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was entertaining a friend-a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache and an

rity of her look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of disinterestedness, and it seemed to him he should insult her by

d simply. "I expect t

e returned-which she appeared to a

of her eyes. Richard de Mauves, we have seen, considered he had; but there was doubtless now something in this young woman's eyes that had not been there five years before. The two men conversed formally enough, and M. de Mauves threw off a light bright remark or two about his visit to America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities. He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long pedi

ened attention. "I'm so very sorry; I hoped we had you for the whole summer." Longmore murmured something civil and wondered why M. de Mauves should

me," Longmore said gravely. "

ut, to tell the whole truth, what she needs is to forget herself. She sits alone for hours poring over her English books and looking at life through that terrible brown fog they seem to me-don't they?-to fling over the world. I doubt if your English authors," the Count went on with a serenity which Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, "are very sound reading for young married women. I don't pretend to know much about them; but I remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth-a poet highly esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before any one called. But I suppose you know him-ce genie-la. Every nation has its own ideals of every kind, but when I remember some of OUR charming writers! I think at all events my wife never forgave me and that it was a real shock to h

of humming insects, the chorus of a refrain: "She has a great deal of esprit-she has a great deal of esprit." "Yes,-she has a great deal," he said mechanically, turning to the Count. M. de

"I suspect you of thinking that I don't do my wife justice." he made answer. "Take care-take care, young man; that's a dangerous assu

Hut a deepening subterranean echo, loudest at the last, lingered on his spiritual ear. For the present his keenest sensation was a desire to get awa

It was spoken almost wi

ided

ng a lesson in consideration from M. de Mauves that he put the appeal by with a laugh. The Count frowned as if it were a new and unpleasant sensation for him to be left at

ion was accomplished before bedtime, and as he was not in the least sleepy he devoted the interval to writing two letters, one of them a short note to Madame de Mauves, which he entrusted to a servant for delivery the next morning. He had found it best, he said, to leave Saint-Germain immediately, but he expected to return to Paris early in the autumn. The other letter was the result of his having remembered a d

truth and is trying a while the experiment of living with closed eyes. In the dark she tries to see again the gilding on her idol. Illusion of course is illusion, and one must always pay for it; but there's something truly tragical in seeing an earthly penalty levied on such divine folly as this. As for M. de Mauves he's a shallow Frenchman to his fingers' ends, and I confess I should dislike him for this if he were a much better man. He can't forgive his wife for having married him too extravagantly and loved him too well; since he feels, I suppose, in some uncorrupted corner of his being that as she originally saw him so he ought to have been. It disagr