u will look
like Apollo with his lyre. No, not Apollo. Apollo was the sun itself.
Why are men so much more difficult to duplicate in simile than women?"

"Not all women. I know one for whom there is no duplicate."

"A poet's divine imagination!"

"A man's reverent thankfulness."

The grey eyes kindled, and as the unconscious kindliness grew yet more
kindly La Mothe told himself he had surely advanced a siege trench
towards the defences. As to Ursula, she could not have told why these
last days had been the pleasantest of her life, and would have
indignantly denied that Stephen La Mothe was in any way the cause.
Women do not admit such truths as openly as men, not even to
themselves. But Amboise was no longer dull, the rose garden no longer
a mere relief from the greyness of the hours spent behind the grim
walls which circled it. The sunshine was the same, the budding flowers
were the same, the glorious shift from winter to summer, but they were
the same with a difference, a difference she never paused to analyze.
Spring--the spring of her life--had come upon her unawares.

But a more acknowledged element in the pleasant comfort of these days
had been a sense of support. One of the most corroding sorrows of life
is to be lonely, alienated from sympathy and guidance, and in Amboise
Ursula de Vesc had been very solitary. La Follette was politic,
cautiously non-committal; Hugues of a class apart; Commines an avowed
opponent; Charles too young for companionship; Villon a contempt, and
at times a loathing. Into this solitariness had come Stephen La Mothe,
and the very reaction from acute suspicion had drawn her towards him.
Repentance for an unmerited blame is much nearer akin to love than any
depths of pity. Then to repentance was added gratitude, to gratitude
admiration, and to all three propinquity. Blessed be propinquity! If
Hymen ever raises an altar to his most devoted hand-maid it will be to
the dear goddess Propinquity! Yes! these days had been very pleasant
days.

But an unfailing charm in a charming woman is that one can never tell
what she will do next. Though the grey eyes kindled and the kindliness
in them grew yet more kindly, though the soft embroideries in the
delicate lawn were ruffled by a quicker breath, the natural perversity
of her sex must needs answer perversely, and Ursula de Vesc blew up his
siege trench with a bombshell.

"Monsieur La Mothe, were you ever at Valmy?"

"Yes, mad