Impossible to open it. He scrutinized the walls.
Impossible to scale them. Time was passing. What was to be done? He
heard the door of the house close. The master of the garden was
advancing. He saw a pear-tree nailed against the wall. There was
not a moment to lose. He climbed the pear-tree. He broke a few
branches in doing so, and knocked down a dozen pears. He regretted
doing any damage, but he knew it would be better for him, and indeed
for both of them, if he got out of the way in time.

Just as he let himself drop to the ground on the other side of the
wall, the farmer entered the garden. While Mr. Rougeant was engaged
in searching for the supposed thief with cocked gun, Frank was
walking quickly towards his home.

Of course, the farmer did not find the intruder, but he found the
broken Chaumontel pear-tree, and he saw the pears scattered on the
ground.

"The unmitigated scoundrel," he muttered, "if I saw him now--looking
at his gun--I'd make him decamp. I'd send a few shots into his dirty
hide."

CHAPTER X.

'TWIXT LOVE AND DUTY.

One evening--it was the first week in June, about nine months after
Frank's adventure in the garden--Adele Rougeant was tending her
flowers.

She had been sewing for a time, and now, feeling a want of
relaxation, she went to her parterre. Her violin and her flowers
were her only companions. No wonder she fled to them when inclined
to be sorrowful.

How beautiful the flower-bed looked in the twilight! The weather had
been very warm, the earth which had been previously battered down by
heavy rains was now covered with small cracks, little mouths as it
were, begging for water.

Adele supplied them plentifully with the precious liquid.

Then she armed herself with a pair of gardening gloves, and an old
mason's trowel (any instrument is good to a woman), and began to
plant a row of lobelias all around her pelargoniums.

This done, she looked at her work. There is a pleasure in gazing
upon well-trimmed borders, but this pleasure is increased tenfold
when one thinks that the plants have been arranged by one's own
hands.

The young lady felt this delight: she felt more, she experienced the
soothing influence of nature's sweet converse. She looked at the
primroses, whose slender stalks were bent and which touched each
other as if engaged in silent intercourse. And thus they would die,
she thought, locked in each others fond embrace, their task
accomplished, their life