I tell you the thing calmly, as it appeared to me to pass; but the next day, when I awoke and put memory in the witness-box, I could not conceal from myself that the tale presented a good many improbable features.  I had no mind for the studio, after all, and went instead to the Luxembourg gardens, there, among the sparrows and the statues and the falling leaves, to cool and clear my head.  It is a garden I have always loved.  You sit there in a public place of history and fiction.  Barras and Fouche have looked from these windows.  Lousteau and de Banville (one as real as the other) have rhymed upon these benches.  The city tramples by without the railings to a lively measure; and within and about you, trees rustle, children and sparrows utter their small cries, and the statues look on forever.  Here, then, in a seat opposite the gallery entrance, I set to work on the events of the last night, to disengage (if it were possible) truth from fiction.

The house, by daylight, had proved to be six stories high, the same as ever.  I could find, with all my architectural experience, no room in its altitude for those interminable stairways, no width between its walls for that long corridor, where I had tramped at night.  And there was yet a greater difficulty.  I had read somewhere an aphorism that everything may be false to itself save human nature.  A house might elongate or enlarge itself—­or seem to do so to a gentleman who had been dining.  The ocean might dry up, the rocks melt in the sun, the stars fall from heaven like autumn apples; and there was nothing in these incidents to boggle the philosopher.  But the case of the young lady stood upon a different foundation.  Girls were not good enough, or not good that way, or else they were too good.  I was ready to accept any of these views:  all pointed to the same conclusion, which I was thus already on the point of reaching, when a fresh argument occurred, and instantly confirmed it.  I could remember the exact words we had each said; and I had spoken, and she had replied, in English.  Plainly, then, the whole affair was an illusion:  catacombs, and stairs, and charitable lady, all were equally the stuff of dreams.

I had just come to this determination, when there blew a flaw of wind through the autumnal gardens; the dead leaves showered down, and a flight of sparrows, thick as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with sudden pipings.  This agreeable bustle was the affair of a moment, but it startled me from the abstraction into which I had fallen like a summons.  I sat briskly up, and as I did so, my eyes rested on the figure of a lady in a brown jacket and carrying a paint-box.  By her side walked a fellow some years older than myself, with an easel under his arm; and alike by their course and cargo I might judge they were bound for the gallery, where the lady was, doubtless, engaged upon some copying.  You can imagine my surprise when I recognized in her the heroine of my adventure.  To put the matter beyond question, our eyes met, and she, seeing herself remembered and recalling the trim in which I had last beheld her, looked swiftly on the ground with just a shadow of confusion.