cular sentiment can bear without a loss of vigor
or of force.

Ah! how lightly she rested on Calyste's arm! Together they left Les
Touches by the garden-gate which opens on the dunes. Beatrix thought the
sands delightful; she spied the hardy little plants with rose-colored
flowers that grew there, and she gathered a quantity to mix with the
Chartreux pansies which also grow in that arid desert, dividing them
significantly with Calyste, to whom those flowers and their foliage were
to be henceforth an eternal and dreadful relic.

"We'll add a bit of box," she said smiling.

They sat some time together on the jetty, and Calyste, while waiting for
the boat to come over, told her of his juvenile act on the day of her
arrival.

"I knew of your little escapade," she said, "and it was the cause of my
sternness to you that first night."

During their walk Madame de Rochefide had the lightly jesting tone of a
woman who loves, together with a certain tenderness and abandonment of
manner. Calyste had reason to think himself beloved. But when, wandering
along the shore beneath the rocks, they came upon one of those charming
creeks where the waves deposit the most extraordinary mosaic of
brilliant pebbles, and they played there like children gathering the
prettiest, when Calyste at the summit of happiness asked her plainly
to fly with him to Ireland, she resumed her dignified and distant air,
asked for his arm, and continued their walk in silence to what she
called her Tarpeian rock.

"My friend," she said, mounting with slow steps the magnificent block of
granite of which she was making for herself a pedestal, "I have not
the courage to conceal what you are to me. For ten years I have had
no happiness comparable to that which we have just enjoyed together,
searching for shells among those rocks, exchanging pebbles of which I
shall make a necklace more precious far to me than if it were made of
the finest diamonds. I have been once more a little girl, a child, such
as I was at fourteen or sixteen--when I was worthy of you. The love I
have had the happiness to inspire in your heart has raised me in my own
eyes. Understand these words to their magical extent. You have made
me the proudest and happiest of my sex, and you will live longer in my
remembrance, perhaps, than I in yours."

At this moment they reached the summit of the rock, whence they saw the
vast ocean on one side and Brittany on the other, with its golden isles,
i