every fair day. Attended by a fat and sleepy old waiting-woman, she was often to be seen running along the grassy bank with a greyhound that followed her everywhere. For this animal she showed a constancy of affection that made her changefulness to me the more heart-sickening.

Thus, half in love, half in disgust, I sat moodily on my side of the stream one sunny afternoon, watching her on the other side. She had been running a race with the dog, and had just settled down on the green bank, with the hound sitting on his haunches beside her. Both dog and girl were panting, and her face was still merry with the fun of the scamper. Her old attendant had probably been left dozing in some other part of the wood. Here now was an opportunity for me to put in a sweet speech or two. But as I looked at her and thought of her treatment of me, my pride rebelled, and I suppose my face for the moment wore a cloud. My expression, whatever it was, caught the quick eyes of Mlle. Celeste. Being in merriment herself, she was the readier to make scorn of my sulky countenance. She pealed out a derisive laugh.

"Oh, the sour face! Is that what comes of your eternal reading?"

I had in my hand a volume of Plutarch in the French of Amyot. Her ridicule of reading annoyed me.

"No, Mademoiselle, it isn't from books that one draws sourness. I find more sweetness in them than in—most things." I was looking straight at her as I said this.

She pretended to laugh again, but turned quite red.

"Nay, forgive me," I said, instantly softened. "Ah, Celeste, you know too well what is the sweetest of all books for my reading." By my look and sigh, she knew I meant her face. But she chose to be contemptuous.

"Poh! What should a pale scholar know of such books? I tell you, Monsieur de Launay, you will never be a man till you leave your books and see a little of the world."

Though she called me truly enough a pale scholar, I was scarlet for a moment.

"And what do you know of the world, then?" I retorted. "Or of men either?"

"I am only a girl. But as to men, I have met one or two. There is your father, for example. And that brave and handsome Brignan de Brignan."

Whether I loved or not, I was certainly capable of jealousy; and jealousy of the fiercest arose at the name of 

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