g in a garden where there was music, and this music
of harps and violins was grateful to me. I said within myself: 'What a
thing is the heart of man! The woman who has passed me by without seeing
me does not know me, will never know of my existence; I am ignorant
of even her name, and I wish to remain so, but I am conscious that she
exists, and I am glad, content, almost happy. She will be for me the
fair unknown; she cannot prevent me from remembering her. I will think
sometimes of the fair unknown of Chur.'"

"Very good," said she, "but this does not explain the letter."

"We are coming to that," he continued. "I was seated in a copse, by the
roadside. I had the blues--was profoundly weary; there are times when
life weighs on me like a torturing burden. I thought of disappointed
expectations, of dissipated illusions, of the bitterness of my youth and
of my future. You passed by on the road, and I said to myself, 'There
is good in life, because of such encounters, in which we catch renewed
glimpses of what was once pleasant for us to see.'"

"And the note?" she asked again, in a dreamy tone.

He went on: "I never was a philosopher; wisdom consists in performing
only useful actions, and I was born with a taste for the useless. That
evening I saw you climb a hill, in order to gather some flowers; the
hill was steep and you could not reach the flowers. I gathered them for
you, and, in sending my bouquet, I could not resist the temptation of
adding a word. 'Before doing penance,' I said to myself, 'let me commit
this one folly; it shall be the last.' We always flatter ourselves that
each folly will be our last. The unfortunate note had scarcely gone,
when I regretted having sent it; I would have given much to have had it
back; I felt all its impropriety; I have dealt justly by it in tearing
it to pieces. My only excuse was my firm resolution not to meet you, not
to make your acquaintance. Chance ordered otherwise: I was presented to
you, you know by whom, and how; I ended by coming here every evening,
but I rebelled against my own weakness, I condemned myself to absence
for a few days, so as to break a dangerous habit, and, thank God! I have
broken my chain."

She lightly tapped the floor with the tip of her foot, and demanded with
the air of a queen recalling a subject to his allegiance, "Are you to be
believed?"

He had spoken in a half-serious, half-jesting tone, tinged with the
playful melancholy that was natural