e her work; she will feel at once
ashamed and jealous."

And thus, in the most friendly spirit, parting greetings were
interchanged; and refreshment having been hospitably offered, but by
us, as it was late, refused, we withdrew from the Hotel Crecy.

On our way back we repassed the theatre. All was silence and darkness:
the roaring, rushing crowd all vanished and gone--the damps, as well as
the incipient fire, extinct and forgotten. Next morning's papers
explained that it was but some loose drapery on which a spark had
fallen, and which had blazed up and been quenched in a moment.

CHAPTER XXIV.

M. DE BASSOMPIERRE.

Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the
seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are
liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of
their friends, the denizens of a freer world. Unaccountably, perhaps,
and close upon some space of unusually frequent intercourse--some
congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel
would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of
communication--there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long
blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank; alike entire and
unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off; the
visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other
token that indicated remembrance, comes no more.

Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but
knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without
are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which
passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the
wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at
milestones--that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants
with hurry for his friends.

The hermit--if he be a sensible hermit--will swallow his own thoughts,
and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He
will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the
dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself,
creep into a hole of life's wall, and submit decently to the drift
which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the
season.

Let him say, "It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is."
And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, spring's softness
will return