him.

He moved uneasily.

"You will not regret?" he urged, in some anxiety.

"Shall I regret that there is a God? that when we love He speaks with
us?"

He pressed her hands and kissed them. Her faith was vastly simple, yet
vastly complete.

That night he wandered about the restricted area of St Malo long after
the Curfew--La Noyette, as it is termed--had sounded and the private
dwellings were closed. He was distraught with misgivings. Was he a
latent blackguard? he asked himself, or had he yet the courage to
withdraw, to leave this innocent girl buried in her dungeon,
inconsolable and doubting his fidelity?

No, he had not the courage. Fate held out its magnet--he must go whither
it should lead. He was not an apostle--merely a man, an atom in the
fortuitous system to be swept where destiny should decide. Need he, an
artist, be more chivalrous--he put it baldly--more conventional and
self-abnegating than other men? Must he, when the delicious moment of
love's ripening had arrived, forbear to pluck, to eat? As he had loved
this Breton girl a year ago he loved her, despite their severance,
to-day. Nay, more, for in this year had he not flung himself headlong
into the orgies of his Bohemian life to strangle recollection, and had
he not been haunted by memory's unresting ghost, the more exquisite, the
more endearing for its intangible, ineffaceable outlines? He recalled
some verses of homage to the city he had encountered in an old St Malo
record:--

"Quiconque t'a connue aime ton souvenir
Et vers toi, tot ou tard, desire revenir."

He had come back to the "Souvenir" and realised how the character of
this _Ville d'elite_ so "_douce et pieuse_," so grandly sombre, so
exquisitely poetic and noble, was expressed and summed up in her, his
queenly, gracious Leonie. He decided finally that, come what might, she
should be won!

The next day he was seated on the raft full half an hour before she
appeared. In the lap of the waves he espied a purple-suited nymph,
enwound with a sash of Roman red, extending white arms that glistened
like newly chiselled marble in the green spray. Her pretty lips laughed
as she swam towards him, the sole atom in an immensity of chrysoprase.

That day the usual crowd on the shore was thinned; a market and fair of
some kind at St Servan had lured visitors and St Malouians to the other
side of the Pont Roulant. The beach was comparatively deserted, and even
the boatman who was deputed to