the damp grass or the chestnut blossoms that thus reanimated the
past? No. What, then?

Was it his eye to which he owed this alertness? What had he seen?
Nothing. Among the persons he had met, perhaps one might have resembled
some one he had known, and, although he had not recognized it, it might
have rung in his heart all the chords of the past.

Was it not a sound, rather? Very often he had heard by chance a piano,
an unknown voice, even a hand-organ in the street playing some old
air, which had suddenly made him feel twenty years younger, filling his
breast with tender recollections, long buried.

But this appeal, continued, incessant, intangible, almost irritating!
What was there near him to revive thus his extinct emotions?

"It is growing a little cool; we must go home," he said.

They rose, and resumed their walk.

He looked at the poor people sitting on benches, for whom a chair was
too great an expense.

Annette also observed them, and felt disturbed at the thought of their
lives, their occupations, surprised that they should come to lounge in
this beautiful public garden, when their own appearance was so forlorn.

More than ever was Olivier now dreaming over past years. It seemed to
him that a fly was humming in his ear, filling it with a buzzing song of
bygone days.

The young girl, observing his dreamy air, asked:

"What is the matter? You seem sad."

His heart thrilled within him. Who had said that? She or her mother?
Not her mother with her present voice but with her voice of long ago, so
changed that he had only just recognized it.

"Nothing," he replied, smiling. "You entertain me very much; you are
very charming, and you remind me of your mother."

How was it that he had not sooner remarked this strange echo of a voice
once so familiar, now coming from these fresh lips?

"Go on talking," he said.

"Of what?"

"Tell me what your teachers have taught you. Did you like them?"

She began again to chat pleasantly. He listened, stirred by a growing
anxiety; he watched and waited to detect, among the phrases of this
young girl, almost a stranger to his heart, a word, a sound, a laugh,
that seemed to have been imprisoned in her throat since her mother's
youth. Certain intonations made him tremble with astonishment. Of course
there were differences in their tones, the resemblance of which he had
not remarked immediately, and which were in some ways so dissimilar that
he had not confounded t