ain without
her perceiving them, so attentively did she follow the distant flight of
her thought.

"Tell me, little one," said the painter to Annette, "would it bore you
very much to pose for me once or twice?"

"No, indeed! Quite the contrary."

"Look well at that young lady who is roaming in the world of fancy."

"The lady there, in that chair?"

"Yes. Well, you, too, will sit on a chair, you will have an open book
on your knee, and you will try to do as she does. Have you ever had
daydreams?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Of what?"

He tried to confess her as to her aerial flights, but she would make
no reply, evaded his questions, looked at the ducks swimming after some
bread thrown to them by a lady, and seemed embarrassed, as if he had
touched upon a subject that was a sensitive point with her.

Then, to change the conversation, she talked about her life at
Roncieres, spoke of her grandmother, to whom she read aloud a long time
every day, and who must now feel very lonely and sad.

As he listened, the painter felt as gay as a bird, gay as he never
had been. All that she had said, all the doings, the trifling everyday
details of the simple life of a young girl, amused and interested him.

"Let us sit down," he said.

They seated themselves near the water, and the two swans came floating
toward them, expecting some fresh dainty.

Bertin felt recollections awakening within him--those faded remembrances
that are drowned in forgetfulness, and which suddenly return, one knows
not why. They surged up rapidly, of all sorts, and so numerous at the
same time that it seemed to him a hand was stirring the miry depths of
his memory.

He tried to guess the reasons of this rising up of his former life which
several times already, though never so insistently as to-day, he had
felt and remarked. A cause always existed for these sudden evocations--a
natural and simple cause, an odor, perhaps, often a perfume. How
many times a woman's draperies had thrown to him in passing, with the
evaporating breath of some essence, a host of forgotten events. At the
bottom of old perfume-bottles he had often found bits of his former
existence; and all wandering odors--of streets, fields, houses,
furniture, sweet or unsavory, the warm odors of summer evenings, the
cold breath of winter nights, revived within him far-off reminiscences,
as if odors kept embalmed within him these dead-and-gone memories, as
aromatics preserve mummies.

Was it