ed
indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her at
last acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, looking
more majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her
arms. He spoke to her after the play, was received with the usual
quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and
obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent on telling
her that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him. He knew that
this was like the sudden impulse of a madman--incongruous even with his
habitual foibles. No matter! It was the one thing which he was
resolved to do. He had two selves within him apparently, and they must
learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our
infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide
plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
towards her.

"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him the
next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with
eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders.
"Are all Englishmen like that?"

"I came because I could not live without trying to see you. You are
lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait,
but I want you to promise that you will marry me--no one else."

Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt
close to her knees.

"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping her
arms folded. "My foot really slipped."

"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly. "It was a fatal
accident--a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."

Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "_I meant to do it._"

Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed
to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.

"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently. "He was
brutal to you: you hated him."

"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
my country; that was not agreeable to me."

"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. "And you planned