Helene reclined in an invalid chair, reading in front of one of the windows, her knee still in bandages.  She suffered no pain; but she had been confined to her room for a week past, unable even to take up her customary needlework.  Not knowing what to do, she had opened a book which she had found on the table—­she, who indulged in little or no reading at any time.  This book was the one she used every night as a shade for the night-lamp, the only volume which she had taken within eighteen months from the small but irreproachable library selected by Monsieur Rambaud.  Novels usually seemed to her false to life and puerile; and this one, Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” had at first wearied her to death.  However, a strange curiosity had grown upon her, and she was finishing it, at times affected to tears, and at times rather bored, when she would let it slip from her hand for long minutes and gaze fixedly at the far-stretching horizon.

That morning Paris awoke from sleep with a smiling indolence.  A mass of vapor, following the valley of the Seine, shrouded the two banks from view.  This mist was light and milky, and the sun, gathering strength, was slowly tinging it with radiance.  Nothing of the city was distinguishable through this floating muslin.  In the hollows the haze thickened and assumed a bluish tint; while over certain broad expanses delicate transparencies appeared, a golden dust, beneath which you could divine the depths of the streets; and up above domes and steeples rent the mist, rearing grey outlines to which clung shreds of the haze which they had pierced.  At times cloudlets of yellow smoke would, like giant birds, heavy of wing, slowly soar on high, and then mingle with the atmosphere which seemed to absorb them.  And above all this immensity, this mass of cloud, hanging in slumber over Paris, a sky of extreme purity, of a faint and whitening blue, spread out its mighty vault.  The sun was climbing the heavens, scattering a spray of soft rays; a pale golden light, akin in hue to the flaxen tresses of a child, was streaming down like rain, filling the atmosphere with the warm quiver of its sparkle.  It was like a festival of the infinite, instinct with sovereign peacefulness and gentle gaiety, whilst the city, chequered with golden beams, still remained lazy and sleepy, unwilling to reveal itself by casting off its coverlet of lace.

For eight days it had been Helene’s diversion to gaze on that mighty expanse of Paris, and she never wearied of doing so.  It was as unfathomable and varying as the ocean—­fair in the morning, ruddy with fire at night, borrowing all the joys and sorrows of the heavens reflected in its depths.  A flash of sunshine came, and it would roll in waves of gold; a cloud would darken it and raise a tempest.  Its aspect was ever changing.  A complete calm would fall, and all would assume an orange hue; gusts of wind would sweep by from time to time, and turn everything livid; in keen, bright weather there would