is leaving her bed in her white airy chemise. The Count
d'Etraille, who was seated on the box, cried:

"Look! look! a hare!" and he pointed toward the left, indicating a
piece of hedge. The leveret threaded its way along, almost concealed by
the field, only its large ears visible. Then it swerved across a deep
rut, stopped, again pursued its easy course, changed its direction,
stopped anew, disturbed, spying out every danger, and undecided as to
the route it should take. Suddenly it began to run, with great bounds
from its hind legs, disappearing finally in a large patch of beet-root.
All the men had woke up to watch the course of the beast.

Rene Lemanoir then exclaimed

"We are not at all gallant this morning," and looking at his neighbor,
the little Baroness of Serennes, who was struggling with drowsiness, he
said to her in a subdued voice: "You are thinking of your husband,
Baroness. Reassure yourself; he will not return before Saturday, so you
have still four days."

She responded to him with a sleepy smile.

"How rude you are." Then, shaking off her torpor, she added: "Now, let
somebody say something that will make us all laugh. You, Monsieur
Chenal who have the reputation of possessing a larger fortune than the
Duke of Richelieu, tell us a love story in which you have been mixed
up, anything you like."

Leon Chenal, an old painter, who had once keen very handsome, very
strong, who was very proud of his physique and very amiable, took his
long white beard in his hand and smiled; then, after a few moments'
reflection, he became suddenly grave.

"Ladies, it will not be an amusing tale; for I am going to relate to
you the most lamentable love affair of my life, and I sincerely hope
that none of my friends has ever passed through a similar experience."

I.

"At that time I was twenty-five years old, and was making daubs along
the coast of Normandy. I call 'making daubs' that wandering about, with
a bag on one's back, from mountain to mountain, under the pretext of
studying and of sketching nature. I know nothing more enjoyable than
that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free;
without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation,
without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please,
without any guide save your fancy, without any counselor save your
eyes. You pull up, because a running brook seduces you, or because you
are attracted, in front of an inn,