ffection--and it is profound, is it not,
Guy?--dated only from the moment that we have just passed."

"I do not regret the past," he said.

"Nor I! Yet I would like to efface it--yes, by a single stroke!"

She held between her white fingers some rebellious little locks of hair
that had come out, which she had rolled and twisted, and casting them
into the clear flame, she said:

"See! to burn it like that!--_Pft!_--"

"Burn it?" Lissac repeated.

He had left the window, returned to Marianne and smiling in his turn, he
said:

"Why burn it?--Because it is tiresome or because it is dangerous?"

"Both!" she replied.

She paused for a moment before continuing, drew up over her arms the
lace of her chemisette, then half bending her head, and looking at Guy
like a creditor of love she said:

"You still have my letters, my dear?"

"Your letters?"

"Those of the old days?"

"That is so," he said. "The past."

He understood everything now.

"You came to ask me to return them?"

"I have been, you must admit, very considerate, not to have claimed
them--before!"

"You have been--generous!" answered Lissac, with a gracious smile.

He opened his secretaire, one of the drawers of which contained little
packages folded and tied with bands of silk ribbon, that slept the sleep
of forgotten things.

"There are your letters, my dear Marianne! But you have nothing to fear;
they have never left this spot."

The eyes of the young woman sparkled with a joyous light. Slowly as if
afraid that Guy would not give them to her, she extended her bare arm
toward the packet of letters and snatched it suddenly.

"My letters!"

"It is an entire romance," said Lissac.

"Less the epilogue!" she said, still enveloping him with her intense
look.

She placed the packet on the velvet-covered mantelpiece and hastily
finished dressing. Then taking between her fingers those little letters
in their old-fashioned envelopes bearing her monogram, and that still
bore traces of a woman's perfume, she looked at them for a moment and
said to Lissac:

"You have read them occasionally?"

"I know them by heart!"

"My poor letters!--I was quite sincere, you know, when I wrote you
them!--They must be very artless! Yours, that I have burned, were too
clever. I remember that one day you wrote me from Holland: 'I pass my
life among chefs-d'oeuvre, but my mind is far away from them. I have
Rembrandt and Ruysdael; but the smallest millet seed wo