y the sinuosities of the stream, which the
willows, oaks, and beeches made as leafy as a woodland glade. From the
house to this natural rampart stretched a mass of verdure peculiar to
that rich soil; a beautiful green sheet bordered by a fringe of rare
trees, the tones of which formed a tapestry of exquisite coloring:
there, the silvery tints of a pine stood forth against the darker green
of several alders; here, before a group of sturdy oaks a slender poplar
lifted its palm-like figure, ever swaying; farther on, the weeping
willows drooped their pale foliage between the stout, round-headed
walnuts. This belt of trees enabled the occupants of the house to go
down at all hours to the river-bank fearless of the rays of the sun.

The facade of the house, before which lay the yellow ribbon of a
gravelled terrace, was shaded by a wooden gallery, around which climbing
plants were twining, and tossing in this month of May their various
blossoms into the very windows of the second floor. Without being really
vast, this garden seemed immense from the manner in which its vistas
were cut; points of view, cleverly contrived through the rise and fall
of the ground, married themselves, as it were, to those of the valley,
where the eye could rove at will. Following the instincts of her
thought, Gabrielle could either enter the solitude of a narrow space,
seeing naught but the thick green and the blue of the sky above the
tree-tops, or she could hover above a glorious prospect, letting her
eyes follow those many-shaded green lines, from the brilliant colors
of the foreground to the pure tones of the horizon on which they lost
themselves, sometimes in the blue ocean of the atmosphere, sometimes in
the cumuli that floated above it.

Watched over by her grandmother and served by her former nurse,
Gabrielle Beauvouloir never left this modest home except for the parish
church, the steeple of which could be seen at the summit of the hill,
whither she was always accompanied by her grandmother, her nurse, and
her father's valet. She had reached the age of seventeen in that sweet
ignorance which the rarity of books allowed a girl to retain without
appearing extraordinary at a period when educated women were thought
phenomenal. The house had been to her a convent, but with more freedom,
less enforced prayer,--a retreat where she had lived beneath the eye of
a pious old woman and the protection of her father, the only man she had
ever known. Thi