ndness he had known, and came to regard Suzette as
a tolerably bad person, who had bewitched him. He burned all her
letters, and a little lock of hair he had clipped while she was asleep
once, and blotted the whole experience out of his diary. The next Sunday
he went to hear the Rev. Mr. Hall preach, and felt quite consoled.

The summer fell upon Val d'Arno like the upsetting of a Tuscan
_Scaldino_, and Ralph Flare regretfully took his departure northward.
All the world was going to Paris--why not he? Was he afraid? Certainly
not; it had been a great victory over temptation to stay away so long.
He would carry out the triumph by braving a return.

In accordance with his principles of economy, he took a third-class
ticket at Basle. He could so make better studies of passengers; for,
somehow, your first-class people have not character faces. The only
character you get out of them is the character of wine they consume.

He left the Alps behind him, and rolled all day through the prosaic
plains of France; startling the pale little towns, down whose treeless
streets the sun shone, oh! so drearily, and taking up boors and
market-folks at every monastic station. There was a pretty young girl
sitting beside Ralph in the afternoon, but he refused to talk to her,
for he was schooling himself, and preferred to scan the features of an
odd old couple who got in at Troyes.

They were two old people of the country, and they sat together in the
descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their
chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was
commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were
paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded
indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met
some soft departed scene which she would have none other see.

"She has a good face," said Flare. "I wish she would keep there a moment
more. By George, she looks like somebody I have known."

The old man nodded on his staff. The rumble of the carriages subdued to
a lull all lesser talk or murmurs, and the sky afar off brought into
sharp relief the two Gallic profiles, close together, as if they were
used to reposing so; yet in the language of their deepening lines lay
the stories of lives very, very wide apart.

"The old girl's face is soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened
many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is