demanded, the night before? How had she treated me, his friend? She
was--many things which you know nothing about, Melody, my dear; the very
least of them was cat, and serpent, and traitress. But I took a cool
tone.

"Is it true, Yvon," I asked, "about the gentleman who comes to-morrow?
You have already known about it? It is true?"

"True!" cried Yvon, his passion breaking out. "Yes, it is true! What,
then? Because my sister is to marry, some day,--she is but just out of
her pinafores, I tell you,--because some day she is to marry, and the
estates are to join, is that a reason that my friend is to be insulted,
my pleasure broken up, my summer destroyed? I insist upon knowing what
that cat said to you, Jacques!"

"She told me what you acknowledge," I said. "That I can be insulted I
deny, unless there be ground for what is said. Mme. de Lalange did what
she considered to be her duty; and--and I have spent a month of great
happiness with you, marquis, and it is a time that will always be the
brightest of my life."

But at this Yvon flung himself on my neck--it is not a thing practised
among men in this country, but in him it seemed nowise strange, my blood
being partly like his own--and wept and stormed. He loved me, I am glad
to believe, truly; yet after all the most part was to him, that his
party of pleasure was spoiled, and his plans broken up. And then I
remembered how we had talked together that day in the old grist-mill,
and how he had said that when trouble came, we should spread our wings
and fly away from it. And Ham's words came back to me, too, till I could
almost hear him speak, and see the grave, wise look of him. "Take good
stuff, and grind it in the Lord's mill, and you've got the best this
world can give." And I found that Ham's philosophy was the one that
held.

There was no more question of the gay party that afternoon. Mlle. de
Ste. Valerie did not dine with us, word coming down that her head ached,
and she would not go out. Yvon and I went to walk, and I led the way to
my tower (so I may call it this once), thinking I would like to see it
once more. All these three months and more (counting from the day I
first met Yvon de Ste. Valerie at the priest's house), I had played a
second in the duet, and that right cheerfully. Though my own age, the
marquis was older in many ways from his knowledge of society and its
ways, and his gay, masterful manner; and I, the country lad, had been
too happy only