Since his death, her strength had failed her.  There had been no definite illness, but a giving way for some six or seven months of nature’s resisting powers.  Also—­significant sign of the strength of all her personal affections!—­in addition to the moral and physical strain she had undergone, she had suffered much about this time from the loss of her maid, an old servant and devoted friend, who left her shortly after M. de Pastourelles’ death—­incited, forced thereto by Eugenie—­in order to marry and go out to Canada.  Eugenie had missed her sorely; and insensibly, the struggle to get well had been the harder.  The doctors ordered travel and change, and she had wandered from place to place; only half-conscious, as it often seemed to her; the most docile of patients; accompanied now by one member of the family, now by another; standing as it were, like the bather who has wandered too far from shore, between the onward current which means destruction, and that backward struggle of the will which leads to life.  And little by little the tide of being had turned.  After a winter in Egypt, strength had begun to come back; since then Switzerland and high air had quickened recovery; and now, physically, Eugenie was almost herself again.

But morally, she retained a deep and lasting impress of what she had gone through.  More than ever was she a creature of tenderness, of the most delicate perceptions, of a sensibility, as our ancestors would have called it, too great for this hurrying world.  Her unselfishness, always one of her cradle-gifts, had become almost superhuman; and had she been of another temperament, the men and women about her might have instinctively shrunk from her, as too perfect—­now—­for human nature’s daily food.  But from that she was saved by a score of most womanish, most mundane qualities.  Nobody knew her, luckily, for the saint she was; she herself least of all.  As her strength renewed itself, her soft fun, too, came back, her gentle, inexhaustible delight in the absurdities of men and things, which gave to her talk and her personality a kind of crackling charm, like the crispness of dry leaves upon an autumn path.  Naturally, and invincibly, she loved life and living; all the high forces and emotions called to her, but also all the patches, stains, and follies of this queer world; and there is no saint, man or woman, of whom this can be said, that has ever repelled the sinners.  It is the difference between St. Francis and St. Dominic!

How very little—­all the same—­could Eugenie feel herself with the saints, on this October afternoon!  She sat, to begin with, on the threshold of Madame de Pompadour’s apartment; and in the next place, she had never been more tremulously steeped in doubts and yearnings, entirely concerned with her friends and her affections.  It was a re-birth; not of youth—­how could that be, she herself would have asked, seeing that she was now thirty-seven?—­but of the natural Eugenie, who, ‘intellectual’