e and her attendants the inviolability of the little domain,
outside of which he forbade them to go without his permission.

Etienne had remained during these two days shut up in the old seignorial
bedroom under the spell of his tenderest memories. In that bed his
mother had slept; her thoughts had been confided to the furnishings of
that room; she had used them; her eyes had often wandered among those
draperies; how often she had gone to that window to call with a cry, a
sign, her poor disowned child, now master of the chateau. Alone in that
room, whither he had last come secretly, brought by Beauvouloir to kiss
his dying mother, he fancied that she lived again; he spoke to her, he
listened to her, he drank from that spring that never faileth, and from
which have flowed so many songs like the "Super flumina Babylonis."

The day after Beauvouloir's return he went to see his young master and
blamed him gently for shutting himself up in a single room, pointing out
to him the danger of leading a prison life in place of his former free
life in the open air.

"But this air is vast," replied Etienne. "The spirit of my mother is in
it."

The physician prevailed, however, by the gentle influence of affection,
in making Etienne promise that he would go out every day, either on the
seashore, or in the fields and meadows which were still unknown to
him. In spite of this, Etienne, absorbed in his memories, remained yet
another day at his window watching the sea, which offered him from that
point of view aspects so various that never, as he believed, had he
seen it so beautiful. He mingled his contemplations with readings
in Petrarch, one of his most favorite authors,--him whose poesy went
nearest to the young man's heart through the constancy and the unity of
his love. Etienne had not within him the stuff for several passions. He
could love but once, and in one way only. If that love, like all that is
a unit, were intense, it must also be calm in its expression, sweet and
pure like the sonnets of the Italian poet.

At sunset this child of solitude began to sing, in the marvellous voice
which had entered suddenly, like a hope, into the dullest of all ears to
music,--those of his father. He expressed his melancholy by varying the
same air, which he repeated, again and again, like the nightingale. This
air, attributed to the late King Henri IV., was not the so-called air
of "Gabrielle," but something far superior as art, as melody