ier the portress, she looked up to see whether the windows of the
garret over her own rooms were lighted up. At that hour, even in July,
it was so dark within the courtyard that the old maid could not get to
bed without a light.

"Oh, you may be quite easy, Monsieur Steinbock is in his room. He has
not been out even," said Madame Olivier, with meaning.

Lisbeth made no reply. She was still a peasant, in so far that she was
indifferent to the gossip of persons unconnected with her. Just as a
peasant sees nothing beyond his village, she cared for nobody's opinion
outside the little circle in which she lived. So she boldly went up, not
to her own room, but to the garret; and this is why. At dessert she had
filled her bag with fruit and sweets for her lover, and she went to give
them to him, exactly as an old lady brings home a biscuit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense's dreams working by the light of a small
lamp, of which the light was intensified by the use of a bottle of water
as a lens--a pale young man, seated at a workman's bench covered with a
modeler's tools, wax, chisels, rough-hewn stone, and bronze castings; he
wore a blouse, and had in his hand a little group in red wax, which he
gazed at like a poet absorbed in his labors.

"Here, Wenceslas, see what I have brought you," said she, laying her
handkerchief on a corner of the table; then she carefully took the
sweetmeats and fruit out of her bag.

"You are very kind, mademoiselle," replied the exile in melancholy
tones.

"It will do you good, poor boy. You get feverish by working so hard; you
were not born to such a rough life."

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at her with a bewildered air.

"Eat--come, eat," said she sharply, "instead of looking at me as you do
at one of your images when you are satisfied with it."

On being thus smacked with words, the young man seemed less puzzled,
for this, indeed, was the female Mentor whose tender moods were always a
surprise to him, so much more accustomed was he to be scolded.

Though Steinbock was nine-and-twenty, like many fair men, he looked five
or six years younger; and seeing his youth, though its freshness had
faded under the fatigue and stress of life in exile, by the side of
that dry, hard face, it seemed as though Nature had blundered in the
distribution of sex. He rose and threw himself into a deep chair of
Louis XV. pattern, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, as if to rest
himself. The old ma