“Yes—­it has been discovered at the Academie Francaise that Mademoiselle Hortense Dufresnoy has written the best poem on Thermopylae.”

She drew a deep breath, pressed her hands tightly together, and murmured:—­

“Alas! is that all?”

“All!  Nay—­is it not enough to step at once into fame—­to have been advocated by Beranger—­to have the poem crowned in the Theatre of the Academie Francaise?”

She stood silent, with drooping head and listless hands, all disappointment and despondency.  Presently she looked up.

“Where did you learn this?” she asked.

I handed her the journal.

“Come in, fellow-student,” said she, and held the door wide for me to enter.

For the second time I found myself in her little salon, and found everything in the self-same order.

“Well,” I said, “are you not happy?”

She shook her head.

“Success is not happiness,” she replied, smiling mournfully.  “That Beranger should have advocated my poem is an honor beyond price; but—­but I need more than this to make me happy.”

And her eyes wandered, with a strange, yearning look, to the sword over the chimney-piece.

Seeing that look, my heart sank, and the tears sprang unbidden to my eyes.  Whose was the sword?  For whose sake was her life so lonely and secluded?  For whom was she waiting?  Surely here, if one could but read it aright, lay the secret of her strange and sudden journeys—­here I touched unawares upon the mystery of her life!

I did not speak.  I shaded my face with my hand, and sat looking on the ground.  Then, the silence remaining unbroken, I rose, and examined the drawings on the walls.

They were water-colors for the most part, and treated in a masterly but quite peculiar style.  The skies were sombre, the foregrounds singularly elaborate, the color stern and forcible.  Angry sunsets barred by lines of purple cirrus stratus; sweeps of desolate heath bounded by jagged peaks; steep mountain passes crimson with faded ferns and half-obscured by rain-clouds; strange studies of weeds, and rivers, and lonely reaches of desolate sea-shore ... these were some of the subjects, and all were evidently by the same hand.

“Ah,” said Hortense, “you are criticizing my sketches!”

“Your sketches!” I exclaimed.  “Are these your work?”

“Certainly,” she replied, smiling.  “Why not?  What do you think of them?”

“What do I think of them!  Well, I think that if you had not been a poet you ought to have been a painter.  How fortunate you are in being able to express yourself so variously!  Are these compositions, or studies from Nature?”

“All studies from Nature—­mere records of fact.  I do not presume to create—­I am content humbly and from a distance to copy the changing moods of Nature.”

“Pray be your own catalogue, then, and tell me where these places are.”