with eyes full of tears and anxiety.

"Ah! Mother of Pity! Monsieur is safe!" she cried. "Where has monsieur
been, _mon Dieu!_"

"To mass, my child," I said gravely, filling her plump arms with the
ducks. "Monsieur le Cure is coming to dinner!"

[Illustration: flying ducks]

* * * * *

[Illustration: a chateau]

CHAPTER THREE

THE EXQUISITE MADAME DE BREVILLE

Poor Tanrade! Just as I felt the future was all _couleur de rose_ with
him it has changed to gloom unutterable.

_Ah, les femmes!_ I should never dare fall in love with a woman as
exquisite as Alice de Breville. She is too beautiful, too seductive,
with her olive skin, her frank smile, and her adorable head poised upon
a body much too well made. She is too tender, too complex, too
intelligent. She has a way of mischievously caressing you with her eyes
one moment and giving an old comrade like myself a platonic little pat
on the back the next, which is exasperating. As a friend I adore her,
but to fall in love with her! _Ah, non, merci!_ I have had a checkered
childhood and my full share of suffering; I wish some peace in my old
age. At sixteen one goes to the war of love blindly, but at forty it is
different. Our chagrins then plunge us into a state of dignified
desolation.

Poor Tanrade! I learned of the catastrophe the other night when he
solemnly entered my abandoned house by the marsh and sank his big frame
in the armchair before my fire. He was no longer the genial bohemian of
a Tanrade I had known. He was silent and haggard. He had not slept much
for a week; neither had he worked at the score of his new opera or
hunted, but he had smoked incessantly, furiously--a dangerous remedy
with which to mend a broken heart.

My poor old friend! I was so certain of his happiness that night after
dinner here in the House Abandoned, when he and Alice had lost
themselves in the moonlight. Was it the moonlight? Or the kiss she gave
him as they stood looking out over the lichen-stained wall of the
courtyard to the fairy marsh beyond, still and sublime--wedded to the
open sea at high tide--like a mirror of polished silver, its surface
ruffled now and then by the splash of some incoming duck. He had poured
out his heart to her then, and again over their liqueur and cigarettes
at that fatal dinner of two at the chateau.

All this he confessed to me as he sat staring into the cheery blaze on
my hearth. Under