hem at all; but these differences rendered all
the more striking this sudden reproduction of the maternal speech. He
had noted their facial resemblance with a friendly and curious eye, but
now the mystery of this resuscitated voice mingled them in such a way
that, turning away his head that he might no longer see the young girl,
he asked himself whether it were not the Countess who was speaking thus
to him, twelve years earlier.

Then when he had woven this hallucination, he turned toward her again,
and found, as their eyes met, a little of the shy hesitation with which
the mother's gaze had met his in the first days of their love.

They had already walked three times around the park, passing always
before the same persons, the same nurses and children.

Annette was now inspecting the buildings surrounding the garden,
inquiring the names of their owners. She wished to know all about them,
asked questions with eager curiosity, seeming to fill her feminine mind
with these details, and, with interested face, listening with her eyes
as much as with her ears.

But when they arrived at the pavilion that separates the two gates of
the outer boulevard, Bertin perceived that it was almost four o'clock.

"Oh," he said, "we must go home."

They walked slowly toward the Boulevard Malesherbes.

After the painter had left Annette at her home he proceeded toward the
Place de la Concorde.

He sang to himself softly, longed to run, and would have been glad to
jump over the benches, so agile did he feel. Paris seemed radiant to
him, more beautiful than ever. "Decidedly the springtime revarnishes the
whole world," was his reflection.

He was in one of those periods of mental excitement when one understands
everything with more pleasure, when the vision is clearer and more
comprehensive, when one feels a keener joy in seeing and feeling, as if
an all-powerful hand had brightened all the colors of earth, reanimated
all living creatures, and had wound up in us, as in a watch that has
stopped, the activity of sensation.

He thought, as his glance took in a thousand amusing things: "And I said
that there were moments when I could no longer find subjects to paint!"

He felt such a sensation of freedom and clear-sightedness that all his
artistic work seemed commonplace to him, and he conceived a new way of
expressing life, truer and more original; and suddenly he was seized
with a desire to return home and work, so he retraced his st