ers. Gabrielle exclaimed at his last words. Questioned why, she
blushed and avoided answering; then when a shadow passed across that
brow which death seemed to graze with its pinion, across that visible
soul where the young man's slightest emotions showed, she answered:--

"Because I too love flowers."

To believe ourselves linked far back in the past by community of tastes,
is not that a declaration of love such as virgins know how to give? Love
desires to seem old; it is a coquetry of youth.

Etienne brought flowers on the morrow, ordering his people to find rare
ones, as his mother had done in earlier days for him. Who knows the
depths to which the roots of a feeling reach in the soul of a solitary
being thus returning to the traditions of mother-love in order to bestow
upon a woman the same caressing devotion with which his mother had
charmed his life? To him, what grandeur in these nothings wherein were
blended his only two affections. Flowers and music thus became the
language of their love. Gabrielle replied to Etienne's gifts by nosegays
of her own,--nosegays which told the wise old doctor that his ignorant
daughter already knew enough. The material ignorance of these two
lovers was like a dark background on which the faintest lines of their
all-spiritual intercourse were traced with exquisite delicacy, like the
red, pure outlines of Etruscan figures. Their slightest words brought
a flood of ideas, because each was the fruit of their long meditations.
Incapable of boldly looking forward, each beginning seemed to them
an end. Though absolutely free, they were imprisoned in their own
simplicity, which would have been disheartening had either given a
meaning to their confused desires. They were poets and poem both. Music,
the most sensual of arts for loving souls, was the interpreter of their
ideas; they took delight in repeating the same harmony, letting their
passion flow through those fine sheets of sound in which their souls
could vibrate without obstacle.

Many loves proceed through opposition; through struggles and
reconciliations, the vulgar struggle of mind and matter. But the first
wing-beat of true love sends it far beyond such struggles. Where all is
of the same essence, two natures are no longer to be distinguished; like
genius in its highest expression, such love can sustain itself in the
brightest light; it grows beneath the light, it needs no shade to bring
it into relief. Gabrielle, because she w