n the future--in short, she was happy, happy
without alarms or hindrances. The vast castle, the gardens, the park,
the forest, favored love.

Lousteau found in Madame de la Baudraye an artlessness, nay, if you
will, an innocence of mind which made her very original; there was much
more of the unexpected and winning in her than in a girl. Lousteau was
quite alive to a form of flattery which in most women is assumed, but
which in Dinah was genuine; she really learned from him the ways of
love; he really was the first to reign in her heart. And, indeed, he
took the trouble to be exceedingly amiable.

Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of _cantabile_,
of _nocturnes_, airs and refrains--shall we say of recipes, although we
speak of love--which each one believes to be exclusively his own. Men
who have reached Lousteau's age try to distribute the "movements"
of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion. Lousteau,
regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection, was
eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and during that
beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing melodies and
most elaborate _barcarolles_. In fact, he exhausted every resource of
the stage management of love, to use an expression borrowed from the
theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of his manoeuvres.

"If that woman ever forgets me!" he would sometimes say to himself as
they returned together from a long walk in the woods, "I will owe her no
grudge--she will have found something better."

When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting
score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.

Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave
Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence
in Paris. Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the
journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an artist
from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.

"What are you going to do?" asked Lousteau. "What is to be done to the
chateau?"

"This is what I am going to do," said the little man, leading Lousteau,
the local artist, and Dinah out on the terrace.

He pointed out, on the front of the building, a shield supported by two
sirens, not unlike that which may be seen on the arcade, now closed,
through which there used to be a passage from the Quai des Tuileries to
the co