He lifts his head and looks forward.  Honore and Frowenfeld are walking arm-in-arm under the furthermost row of willows.  Honore is speaking.  How gracefully, in correspondence with his words, his free arm or hand—­sometimes his head or even his lithe form—­moves in quiet gesture, while the grave, receptive apothecary takes into his meditative mind, as into a large, cool cistern, the valued rain-fall of his friend’s communications.  They are near enough for the little doctor easily to call them; but he is silent.  The unhappy feel so far away from the happy.  Yet—­“Take care!” comes suddenly to his lips, and is almost spoken; for the two, about to cross toward the Place d’Armes at the very spot where Aurora had once made her narrow escape, draw suddenly back, while the black driver of a volante reins up the horse he bestrides, and the animal himself swerves and stops.

The two friends, though startled apart, hasten with lifted hats to the side of the volante, profoundly convinced that one, at least, of its two occupants is heartily sorry that they were not rolled in the dust.  Ah, ah! with what a wicked, ill-stifled merriment those two ethereal women bend forward in the faintly perfumed clouds of their ravishing summer-evening garb, to express their equivocal mortification and regret.

“Oh!  I’m so sawry, oh!  Almoze runned o’—­ah, ha, ha, ha!”

Aurora could keep the laugh back no longer.

“An’ righd yeh befo’ haivry boddie!  Ah, ha, ha!  ’Sieur Grandissime, ’tis me-e-e w’ad know ‘ow dad is bad, ha, ha, ha!  Oh!  I assu’ you, gen’lemen, id is hawful!”

And so on.

By and by Honore seemed urging them to do something, the thought of which made them laugh, yet was entertained as not entirely absurd.  It may have been that to which they presently seemed to consent; they alighted from the volante, dismissed it, and walked each at a partner’s side down the grassy avenue of the levee.  It was as Clotilde with one hand swept her light robes into perfect adjustment for the walk, and turned to take the first step with Frowenfeld, that she raised her eyes for the merest instant to his, and there passed between them an exchange of glance which made the heart of the little doctor suddenly burn like a ball of fire.

“Now we’re all right,” he murmured bitterly to himself, as, without having seen him, she took the arm of the apothecary, and they moved away.

Yes, if his irony was meant for this pair, he divined correctly.  Their hearts had found utterance across the lips, and the future stood waiting for them on the threshold of a new existence, to usher them into a perpetual copartnership in all its joys and sorrows, its disappointments, its imperishable hopes, its aims, its conflicts, its rewards; and the true—­the great—­the everlasting God of love was with them.  Yes, it had been “all right,” now, for nearly twenty-four hours—­an age of bliss.  And now, as they walked beneath the willows where so many lovers had walked before them, they had whole histories to tell of the tremors, the dismays, the misconstructions and longings through which their hearts had come to this bliss; how at such a time, thus and so; and after such and such a meeting, so and so; no part of which was heard by alien ears, except a fragment of Clotilde’s speech caught by a small boy in unintentioned ambush.