the case of a pair of lovers who, with less to
fear of life, were yet--after the manner of their kind--more timid of
heart than he. Curiosity drew him from his warm trough to the edge of
the hay. Lying prone, he advanced his head and peered down.

In the space of cropped meadow between the barn and the hedge stood a
man and a woman, both young. The man was a well-set-up, comely fellow,
with a fine head of chestnut hair tied in a queue by a broad bow of
black satin. He was dressed with certain tawdry attempts at ostentatious
embellishments, which did not prepossess one at first glance in his
favour. His coat of a fashionable cut was of faded plum-coloured velvet
edged with silver lace, whose glory had long since departed. He affected
ruffles, but for want of starch they hung like weeping willows over
hands that were fine and delicate. His breeches were of plain black
cloth, and his black stockings were of cotton--matters entirely out of
harmony with his magnificent coat. His shoes, stout and serviceable,
were decked with buckles of cheap, lack-lustre paste. But for his
engaging and ingenuous countenance, Andre-Louis must have set him down
as a knight of that order which lives dishonestly by its wits. As it
was, he suspended judgment whilst pushing investigation further by a
study of the girl. At the outset, be it confessed that it was a study
that attracted him prodigiously. And this notwithstanding the fact that,
bookish and studious as were his ways, and in despite of his years, it
was far from his habit to waste consideration on femininity.

The child--she was no more than that, perhaps twenty at the
most--possessed, in addition to the allurements of face and shape that
went very near perfection, a sparkling vivacity and a grace of movement
the like of which Andre-Louis did not remember ever before to have
beheld assembled in one person. And her voice too--that musical, silvery
voice that had awakened him--possessed in its exquisite modulations an
allurement of its own that must have been irresistible, he thought, in
the ugliest of her sex. She wore a hooded mantle of green cloth, and the
hood being thrown back, her dainty head was all revealed to him. There
were glints of gold struck by the morning sun from her light nut-brown
hair that hung in a cluster of curls about her oval face. Her complexion
was of a delicacy that he could compare only with a rose petal. He could
not at that distance discern the colour of her