My wound was healing.  War and stern duty were as things of the far past.  The grand passion had hold of me.  I tried to fight it down, to shake it off, but somehow it had the claws of a tiger.  There was an odd thing about it all:  I could not for the life of me tell which of the two charming girls I loved the better.  It may seem incredible; I could not understand it myself.  They looked alike, and yet they were quite different.  Louison was a year older and of stouter build.  She had more animation also, and always a quicker and perhaps a brighter answer.  The other had a face more serious, albeit no less beautiful, and a slower tongue.  She had little to say, but her silence had much in it to admire, and, indeed, to remember.  They appealed to different men in me with equal force, I did not then know why.  A perplexing problem it was, and I had to think and suffer much before I saw the end of it, and really came to know what love is and what it is not.

[Illustration:  “I could not for the life of me tell which of the two charming girls I loved the better.”]

Shortly I was near the end of this delightful season of illness.  I had been out of bed a week.  The baroness had read to me every day, and had been so kind that I felt a great shame for my part in our deception.  Every afternoon she was off in a boat or in her caleche, and had promised to take me with her as soon as I was able to go.

“You know,” said she, “I am going to make you to stay here a full month.  I have the consent of the general.”

I had begun to move about a little and enjoy the splendor of that forest home.  There were, indeed, many rare and priceless things in it that came out of her chateau in France.  She had some curious old clocks, tokens of ancestral taste and friendship.  There was one her grandfather had got from the land of Louis XIV.—­Le Grand Monarque, of whom my mother had begun to tell me as soon as I could hear with understanding.  Another came from the bedchamber of Philip II of Spain—­a grand high clock that had tolled the hours in that great hall beyond my door.  A little thing, in a case of carved ivory, that ticked on a table near my bed, Moliere had given to one of her ancestors, and there were many others of equal interest.

Her walls were adorned with art treasures of the value of which I had little appreciation those days.  But I remember there were canvases of Correggio and Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds.  She was, indeed, a woman of fine taste, who had brought her best to America; for no one had a doubt, in the time of which I am writing, that the settlement of the Compagnie de New York would grow into a great colony, with towns and cities and fine roadways, and the full complement of high living.  She had built the Hermitage,—­that was the name of the mansion,—­fine and splendid as it was, for a mere temporary shelter pending the arrival of those better days.