and there was a brave ring in his "_bonsoir,
mon vieux_," as he swung off in the dusk of the starlit road.

He left the village the next day at noon by the toy train, "the little
get off-the-track," as we call it. Perhaps he wished it would and end
everything, including the rehearsals.

Bah! To be rehearsing lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses in sylvan
dells. To call a halt eighteen times in the middle of the romantic duet
between the unhappy innkeeper's daughter and the prince. To marry them
all smoothly in B flat in the finale, and keep the brass down and the
strings up in the apotheosis when the heart of the man behind the baton
has been cured of all love and illusion--for did he not tell me "It is
well finished"? Poor Tanrade!

Though it is but half a fortnight since he left, it seems years since he
used to come into my courtyard, for he came and went as freely at all
hours as the salt breeze from the marsh. Often he would wake me at
daybreak, bellowing up to my window at the top of his barytone lungs
some stirring aria, ending with: "Eh, _mon vieux!_ Stop playing the
prince! Get up out of that and come out on the marsh. There are ducks
off the point. Where's Suzette? Where's the coffee? _Sacristi!_ What a
house. Half-past four and nobody awake!"

And he would stand there grinning; his big chest encased in a
fisherman's jersey, a disreputable felt hat jammed on his head, and his
feet in a pair of sabots that clattered like a farm-horse as he went
foraging in the kitchen, upsetting the empty milk-tins and making such a
bedlam that my good little maid-of-all-work, Suzette, would hurry in
terror into her clothes and out to her beloved kitchen to save the rest
from ruin.

Needless to say, nothing ever happened to anything. He could make more
noise and do less harm than any one I ever knew. Then he would sing us
both into good humour until Suzette's peasant cheeks shone like ripe
apples.

"It is not the same without Monsieur Tanrade," Suzette sighed to-day as
she brought my luncheon to my easel in a shady corner of my wild
garden--a corner all cool roses and shadow.

"Ah, no!" I confessed as I squeezed out the last of a tube of vermilion
on the edge of my palette.

"Ah, no!" she sighed softly, and wiped her eyes briskly with the back of
her dimpled red hand. "Ah, no! _Parbleu!_"

And just then the bell over my gate jingled. "Some one rings," whispered
Suzette and she ran to open the gate. It was the _valet