t of watching
over the slumber of some tenderly-beloved one, whose waking eyes will
smile for them, will doubtless understand the bliss and anguish that
shook the colonel. For him this slumber was an illusion, the waking must
be a kind of death, the most dreadful of all deaths.

Suddenly a kid frisked in two or three bounds towards the bench and
snuffed at Stephanie. The sound awakened her; she sprang lightly to her
feet without scaring away the capricious creature; but as soon as she
saw Philip she fled, followed by her four-footed playmate, to a thicket
of elder-trees; then she uttered a little cry like the note of a
startled wild bird, the same sound that the colonel had heard once
before near the grating, when the Countess appeared to M. d'Albon for
the first time. At length she climbed into a laburnum-tree, ensconced
herself in the feathery greenery, and peered out at the _strange man_
with as much interest as the most inquisitive nightingale in the forest.

"Farewell, farewell, farewell," she said, but the soul sent no trace
of expression of feeling through the words, spoken with the careless
intonation of a bird's notes.

"She does not know me!" the colonel exclaimed in despair. "Stephanie!
Here is Philip, your Philip!... Philip!" and the poor soldier went
towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the
Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her
eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and
thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough to bough with marvelous
dexterity.

"Do not follow her," said M. Fanjat, addressing the colonel. "You would
arouse a feeling of aversion in her which might become insurmountable; I
will help you to make her acquaintance and to tame her. Sit down on the
bench. If you pay no heed whatever to her, poor child, it will not be
long before you will see her come nearer by degrees to look at you."

"That _she_ should not know me; that she should fly from me!" the
colonel repeated, sitting down on a rustic bench and leaning his back
against a tree that overshadowed it.

He bowed his head. The doctor remained silent. Before very long the
Countess stole softly down from her high refuge in the spruce-fir,
flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp; for as the wind stirred the boughs,
she lent herself at times to the swaying movements of the trees. At
each branch she stopped and peered at the stranger; but as she saw him
sitting moti