up in my face
with a bright smile of inextinguishable hope. "Good-bye for a year."

A few more days in Florence, a week in Venice, a day or two in Milan,
and we bade adieu to Italy. Land of beauty and mystery! when I recall
thy many forms of loveliness, the glorious shapes of gods and heroes,
serene and passionless in their white majesty of marble, the blessed
sweetness of saints and Madonnas shining down into my soul, I seem to
have been once in heaven and afterward shut out.

* * * * *

We were once more at home. Almost the first news that came to us from
abroad was of the terrible war between France and Germany. During the
protracted siege of Paris we were full of anxieties, but at its close we
received long letters from Madame Le Fort, giving many details of the
sufferings and privations of the siege, sorrowful enough for the most
part, but enlivened here and there with touches of the gay French humor
that nothing can subdue. There was a lively sketch of a Christmas dinner
ingeniously got up of several courses of donkey-meat. At New Year's the
choicest gift that a gentleman could make a lady was a piece of wheaten
bread. Afterward there was nothing in the house but rice and chocolate
bonbons, which they chewed sparingly, a little at a time. But they kept
up their courage--they were even gay. Hardships were nothing, but that
Paris should be surrendered at last--that was a humiliation which
nothing could compensate. Many of the gay dancers whom we had known had
fallen in battle, among them, Rene Vergniaud. He was shot in the heart
in an engagement with the Prussians in the environs of Paris.

I spent my next summer vacation with Miss St. Clair in Detroit.

"When is Mr. Denham coming home?" I asked one evening when we were alone
together.

"I do not know: he does not speak of coming home. I am a little puzzled
about Fred. He has written me a great deal lately about a certain
Fraeulein Teresa, the daughter of one of his professors, who takes such
excellent care of her younger brothers and sisters, and who is such a
wonderfully economical, housewifely little body--just a new edition of
Werther's Charlotte. I do not think that he really likes her," she
continued after musing a little: "he just holds her up as a model for me
to copy. I shouldn't wonder if she was only imaginary, to make me feel
how far I come short of his ideal. Fred says that he worships the very
ground I tread on--sli