I no longer heard, as before, a caressing voice speaking to me through the trees of the garden.  “Courage, friend!  I watch and suffer with thee.”  Finally, one night I saw the star peep forth and shine.  Although I had no heart for such fancies, still I felt young and joyous again, on seeing it.  As before, I gazed at it a long time.  Was it the same, that, for two years, I had seen burn and go out regularly at the same hour?  It might be doubted; but I did not doubt it for a moment, because I took pleasure in believing it.  I felt less isolated and gained confidence, now that my star had not deserted me.  I called it my martyr when I spoke to it:  “Whence comest thou?  Hast thou too suffered?  Hast thou mourned my absence a little?” And, as before, I thought it answered me in the silence of the night.  Towards morning I slept, and in a dream, I saw, as through a glass, Louise watching and working in a room as poor as mine, by the light of the well-beloved ray.  She looked pale and sad, and from time to time stopped her work to gaze at the gleam of my lamp.  When I awoke, it was broad day; and I went out to kill time.

On the boulevard I met an old friend of my father’s; he was refined, cultivated and affectionate.  He had come from our mountains, to which he was already anxious to return, for in their valleys he had buried himself.  My dejected air and sorrowful countenance struck him.  He gained my confidence, and immediately guessed at my complaint.  “What are you doing here?” he asked; “it is an unwholesome place for grief.  Return to our mountains.  Your native air will do you good.  Come with me; I promise you that your unhappiness will not hold out against the perfume of broom and heather.”  Then he spoke with tender earnestness of my duties.  He did not conceal from me the obligations my fortune and the position left me by my father, laid me under to the land where I was born; I had neglected it too long, and the time had now come when I ought to occupy myself seriously with its needs and interests.  In short, he made me blush for my useless days, and led me, gently and firmly, back to reality.  At night-fall I returned to my little chamber, not consoled but stronger, and decided to set out on the morrow for the banks of the Creuse.  I did not expect to be cured, but it pleased me to mingle the thought of Louise with the benefits that I could bestow, and to bring down blessings upon the name which I had longed to offer her.

I immediately remarked on entering, that my little beacon shone with unaccustomed brilliancy.  It was no longer a thread of light gleaming timidly through the foliage, but a whole window brightly illuminated, and standing out against the surrounding darkness.  Investigating the cause of this phenomenon, I discovered that, during the day, the trees had been felled in the garden, and peering out into the gloom, I perceived, stretched along the ground, the trunk of the pine which, for two years, had hid from me the room where burned