to call
anybody an animal in French is a serious matter.

The gardener was working himself up into something of a quiet passion,
and Ste. Marie said:

"Softly, my friend! Softly!" It occurred to him that the man's
resentment might be of use later on, and he said: "You speak the truth.
The old one is an animal, and he is also a great rascal."

But Michel betrayed the makings of a philosopher. He said, with profound
conviction: "Monsieur, all men are great rascals. It is I who say it."

And at that Ste. Marie had to laugh.

* * * * *

He had not consciously directed his feet, but without direction they led
him round the corner of the rose-gardens and toward the rond point. He
knew well whom he would find there. She had not failed him during the
past three days. Each morning he had found her in her place, and for his
allotted hour--which more than once stretched itself out to nearly two
hours, if he had but known--they had sat together on the stone bench,
or, tiring of that, had walked under the trees beyond.

Long afterward Ste. Marie looked back upon these hours with, among other
emotions, a great wonder--at himself and at her. It seemed to him then
one of the strangest relationships--intimacies, for it might well be so
called--that ever existed between a man and a woman, and he was amazed
at the ease, the unconsciousness, with which it had come about.

But during this time he did not allow himself to wonder or to examine,
scarcely even to think. The hours were golden hours, unrelated, he told
himself, to anything else in his life or in his interests. They were
like pleasant dreams, very sweet while they endured, but to be put away
and forgotten upon the waking. Only in that long afterward he knew that
they had not been put away, that they had been with him always, that the
morning hour had remained in his thoughts all the rest of the long day,
and that he had waked upon the morrow with a keen and exquisite sense of
something sweet to come.

It was a strange fool's paradise that the man dwelt in, and in some
small, vague measure he must, even at the time, have known it, for it is
certain that he deliberately held himself away from
thought--realization; that he deliberately shut his eyes, held his ears
lest he should hear or see.

That he was not faithless to his duty has been shown. He did his utmost
there, but he was for the time helpless save for efforts to communicate
with Ri