One beautiful summer night, when all nature seemed hushed in ecstasy, the last blush gone that told of the sun’s parting, Monsieur Vignevielle, in the course of one of those contemplative, uncompanioned walks which it was his habit to take, came slowly along the more open portion of the Rue Royale, with a step which was soft without intention, occasionally touching the end of his stout cane gently to the ground and looking upward among his old acquaintances, the stars.

It was one of those southern nights under whose spell all the sterner energies of the mind cloak themselves and lie down in bivouac, and the fancy and the imagination, that cannot sleep, slip their fetters and escape, beckoned away from behind every flowering bush and sweet-smelling tree, and every stretch of lonely, half-lighted walk, by the genius of poetry.  The air stirred softly now and then, and was still again, as if the breezes lifted their expectant pinions and lowered them once more, awaiting the rising of the moon in a silence which fell upon the fields, the roads, the gardens, the walls, and the suburban and half-suburban streets, like a pause in worship.  And anon she rose.

Monsieur Vignevielle’s steps were bent toward the more central part of the town, and he was presently passing along a high, close, board-fence, on the right hand side of the way, when, just within this enclosure, and almost overhead, in the dark boughs of a large orange-tree, a mocking-bird began the first low flute-notes of his all-night song.  It may have been only the nearness of the songster that attracted the passer’s attention, but he paused and looked up.

And then he remarked something more,—­that the air where he had stopped was filled with the overpowering sweetness of the night-jasmine.  He looked around; it could only be inside the fence.  There was a gate just there.  Would he push it, as his wont was?  The grass was growing about it in a thick turf, as though the entrance had not been used for years.  An iron staple clasped the cross-bar, and was driven deep into the gate-post.  But now an eye that had been in the blacksmithing business—­an eye which had later received high training as an eye for fastenings—­fell upon that staple, and saw at a glance that the wood had shrunk from it, and it had sprung from its hold, though without falling out.  The strange habit asserted itself; he laid his large hand upon the cross-bar; the turf at the base yielded, and the tall gate was drawn partly open.

At that moment, as at the moment whenever he drew or pushed a door or gate, or looked in at a window, he was thinking of one, the image of whose face and form had never left his inner vision since the day it had met him in his life’s path and turned him face about from the way of destruction.