Sweethearts at Home

ng-and no need for an

hair of the pretty daughter of the innkeeper whom we had seen there-in her way quite a Swiss Elizabeth Fortinbras. In a word, I became aware that she had kept a diary. Sweetheart, like her nearest literary relative, began with "poetry." That was what we called

e, just as eagerly as if we had "yielded to the solicitatio

en he has not seen the very least little scrap. All he knows is that Sweetheart has a good many thousand friends scattered up and down two

little town still preserved distinct traces of the hundred and fifty years of Prussian drill-sergeants. Here and there the a

r hold but this once. There, within a day's easy walk, you can pass from Canton Vaud into Canton Friburg and back again into Vaud. Then, Morat-way, you come on a little inset square of Canton Berne, whose emblematic bears also have their claws in every

ly I had known them of old, and though since then the years had done som

kely amused by me as I am by the moldy and the quaint about him-things that nobody in his senses has ever thought of looking at in that countryside for a hundred years! Privately there is often a quiet, widespread, wholly unspoken doubt of my entire sanity. That dry smile hovering about the mouth of the courteous mayor of the commune says as much. Just the same with the quick, intelligent glance that shoots betwixt husband and wife when you ask to see their barn-once the chapel of a long-destroyed monastery (Carthusians from the Italian valleys driven out by the religious wars). To them

our own time, and when we have done

n-or, indeed, whether or not! "To Madame Marie Brigue's!" "Yes, but certainly!" "Had we

examined doubtfully. We should not this time be committed to a House of Retreat for the mentally infirm-no, not if fifty doctors, all specialists

preferred to go alone-that is to say, alone with

ber sky, at the boldly-designed splashes of the leaf-shadows making Japanese patterns on the narrow path through the wood. T

ould certainly break when we met in with Madame Marie. A

She has assisted me as a callow youth to the sweetmeats under her control. In my earlier

"the Last of the Last," and that, altogether apart from my being a heretic, my misdeeds would inevitably

ther, to make her so angry with y

e, as one who would say, "Pray remember that I am no more a simple chil

st glimpse of Madame Marie would instantly free me. For even when I knew her Madame had

would ever refrain from scolding me, ev

s a great quiet everywhere about the place. Some pigeons were coo-cooing in the Basse Cour. A cat regarded us with the sleepy dispassion of its race. However, there was certainly a stirring among earthenware somewhere tow

who, after a short absence, has come back at the proper hour, to find h

hear the splash of the fragments on th

been twelve hours on the mountain

out the 'bergen'! And now-oh, the Good-for-Nothing, the Vaurien, he come back to old Marie

had come without warning, and because I had not come sooner. Scolded because I had let the years slip past till her hair was white like the snow on the mountains, on which I had so often tarried till my dinner was burnt to a cinder! While mine-but there-who was this with me? Was I married? "Your daughter!" A da

n Madame Marie came to the door to say that the omelette was ready to be put before us on the table, she called to Sweetheart that she was indeed her father's own daughter. For that in the old

es of her Diary. I found them so interesting that we arranged on the spot how they were to be pu