r I
have a message to give you from my sister.

Believe me, Madame, of all your servants the most devoted.

Paul de Virieu.

They met in the garden--the garden which they had so often had to
themselves during their short happy mornings; and, guided by an
instinctive longing for solitude, and for being out of sight and out
of mind of those about them, they made their way towards the arch in
the wall which led to the _potager_.

It was just ten o'clock, and the gardeners were leaving off work for an
hour; they had earned their rest, for their work begins each summer day
at sunrise. It was therefore through a sweet-smelling, solitary
wilderness that Count Paul guided his companion.

They walked along the narrow paths edged with fragrant herbs till they
came to the extreme end of the kitchen-garden, and then--

"Shall we go into the orangery?" he asked abruptly.

Sylvia nodded. These were the first words he had uttered since his short
"Good morning. I hope, Madame, you are feeling better?"

He stepped aside to allow her to go first into the large,
finely-proportioned building, which was so charming a survival of
eighteenth-century taste. The orangery was cool, fragrant, deserted;
remote indeed from all that Lacville stands for in this ugly, utilitarian
world.

"Won't you sit down?" he said slowly. And then, as if echoing his
companion's thoughts, "It seems a long, long time since we were first
in the orangery, Madame--"

"--When you asked me so earnestly to leave Lacville," said Sylvia, trying
to speak lightly. She sat down on the circular stone seat, and, as he had
done on that remembered morning when they were still strangers, he took
his place at the other end of it.

"Well?" he said, looking at her fixedly. "Well, you see I came back after
all!"

Sylvia made no answer.

"I ought not to have done so. It was weak of me." He did not look at her
as he spoke; he was tracing imaginary patterns on the stone floor.

"I came back," he concluded, in a low, bitter tone, "because I could not
stay any longer away from you."

And still Sylvia remained silent.

"Do you not believe that?" he asked, rather roughly.

And then at last she looked up and spoke.

"I think you imagine that to be the case," she said, "but I am sure that
it is not I, alone, who brought you back to Lacville."

"And yet it is you--you alone!" he exclaimed and he jumped up and came
and stood before her.

"God knows I do not wish to