ady, whom Aline was now hastening forward
to meet, and because she was named to him he recognized her. He must,
he thought, had he but looked, have recognized her without prompting
anywhere at any time, and this although it was some sixteen years since
last he had seen her. The sight of her now brought it all back to him--a
treasured memory that had never permitted itself to be entirely overlaid
by subsequent events.

When he was a boy of ten, on the eve of being sent to school at Rennes,
she had come on a visit to his godfather, who was her cousin. It
happened that at the time he was taken by Rabouillet to the Manor of
Gavrillac, and there he had been presented to Mme. de Plougastel. The
great lady, in all the glory then of her youthful beauty, with her
gentle, cultured voice--so cultured that she had seemed to speak a
language almost unknown to the little Breton lad--and her majestic air of
the great world, had scared him a little at first. Very gently had she
allayed those fears of his, and by some mysterious enchantment she had
completely enslaved his regard. He recalled now the terror in which
he had gone to the embrace to which he was bidden, and the subsequent
reluctance with which he had left those soft round arms. He remembered,
too, how sweetly she had smelled and the very perfume she had used, a
perfume as of lilac--for memory is singularly tenacious in these matters.

For three days whilst she had been at Gavrillac, he had gone daily to
the manor, and so had spent hours in her company. A childless woman with
the maternal instinct strong within her, she had taken this precociously
intelligent, wide-eyed lad to her heart.

"Give him to me, Cousin Quintin," he remembered her saying on the
last of those days to his godfather. "Let me take him back with me to
Versailles as my adopted child."

But the Seigneur had gravely shaken his head in silent refusal, and
there had been no further question of such a thing. And then, when she
said good-bye to him--the thing came flooding back to him now--there had
been tears in her eyes.

"Think of me sometimes, Andre-Louis," had been her last words.

He remembered how flattered he had been to have won within so short a
time the affection of this great lady. The thing had given him a sense
of importance that had endured for months thereafter, finally to fade
into oblivion.

But all was vividly remembered now upon beholding her again, after
sixteen years, profoundly cha