be a shimmer of light on every housetop; whilst when showers fell, blurring both heaven and earth, all would be plunged in chaotic confusion.  At her window Helene experienced all the hopes and sorrows that pertain to the open sea.  As the keen wind blew in her face she imagined it wafted a saline fragrance; even the ceaseless noise of the city seemed to her like that of a surging tide beating against a rocky cliff.

The book fell from her hands.  She was dreaming, with a far-away look in her eyes.  When she stopped reading thus it was from a desire to linger and understand what she had already perused.  She took a delight in denying her curiosity immediate satisfaction.  The tale filled her soul with a tempest of emotion.  Paris that morning was displaying the same vague joy and sorrow as that which disturbed her heart.  In this lay a great charm—­to be ignorant, to guess things dimly, to yield to slow initiation, with the vague thought that her youth was beginning again.

How full of lies were novels!  She was assuredly right in not reading them.  They were mere fables, good for empty heads with no proper conception of life.  Yet she remained entranced, dreaming unceasingly of the knight Ivanhoe, loved so passionately by two women—­Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess, and the noble Lady Rowena.  She herself thought she could have loved with the intensity and patient serenity of the latter maiden.  To love! to love!  She did not utter the words, but they thrilled her through and through in the very thought, astonishing her, and irradiating her face with a smile.  In the distance some fleecy cloudlets, driven by the breeze, now floated over Paris like a flock of swans.  Huge gaps were being cleft in the fog; a momentary glimpse was given of the left bank, indistinct and clouded, like a city of fairydom seen in a dream; but suddenly a thick curtain of mist swept down, and the fairy city was engulfed, as though by an inundation.  And then the vapors, spreading equally over every district, formed, as it were, a beautiful lake, with milky, placid waters.  There was but one denser streak, indicating the grey, curved course of the Seine.  And slowly over those milky, placid waters shadows passed, like vessels with pink sails, which the young woman followed with a dreamy gaze.  To love! to love!  She smiled as her dream sailed on.

However, she again took up her book.  She had reached the chapter describing the attack on the castle, wherein Rebecca nurses the wounded Ivanhoe, and recounts to him the incidents of the fight, which she gazes at from a window.  Helene felt that she was in the midst of a beautiful falsehood, but roamed through it as through some mythical garden, whose trees are laden with golden fruit, and where she imbibed all sorts of fancies.  Then, at the conclusion of the scene, when Rebecca, wrapped in her veil, exhales her love beside the sleeping knight, Helene again allowed the book to slip from her hand; her heart was so brimful of emotion that she could read no further.