s will be fuller about the beginning of October.'

He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating' himself,
not discordantly at all. The poet of the company within him claimed the
word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde's likings, and
the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in
Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons. She was friande of
chocolates, bon-bons: she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good
wine. She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the
very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and
in millinery likewise. A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian
ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to
Clotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and
mighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she hint
at rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips, half
closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.

CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!'...

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant
his affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer
than she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness,
looking in the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and
eyes charged with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely
all who passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in
their passage. The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a
whirring of wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when
imagination shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the
wheels be not stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality
inside him absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving
multitudinous vivid impressions, he did not commune with one, was
unaware of them. His thick black hair waved and glistened over the
fine aquiline of his face. His throat was open to the breeze. His great
breast and head were joined by a massive column of throat that gave
volume for the coursing of the blood