But the churlish shepherd, the moment he caught sight of me, put up his pipe, whistled to his dogs and rejoined the flock.  I was dissatisfied with his unsocial retreat.  I felt, with renewed force, that a note was lacking to the full harmony of my life, and I threw myself upon a bank.  I tried not to see the artificial roads of the forest, alive with city carriages.  I believed myself lost in a primeval wood, and I examined the state of my heart.  I perceived with concern that that organ was still lacerated.  The languid, musical pageant of my youth streamed toward me again through the leafy aisles, and I remembered my high aspirings, my poems, my ideals:  the floating vision of a Dark Ladye passed or looked up at me through the broken waves of Oblivion; she listened to my rhapsodies with the old puzzling silence; she confided to me certain Sibylline leaves out of her diary; then she receded, cold and unresponsive, a statue cut out of a shadow.  I was obliged to untie my cravat.  Finally, I fell asleep and dreamed of Mary Ashburton crowned with the neat workwoman’s cap of Francine Joliet.  I returned to dinner considerably exalted, and just touched with rheumatism.

The soup was glacial, the roast was steaming, the conversation was geographical.  “Pray, M. Flemming,” said my neighbor (he had been stealing a look at the register of visitors’ names), “can cattle be wintered out of doors as far north as Pennsylvania, or only up to Virginia?”

“Pray,” said another, “is not New York situated between the North River and the Hudson?”

The prayer of a third made itself audible:  “Ought we to say ‘Delightful Wyoming,’ after Campbell, or Wy_o_ming?”

“We ought to eat with thankfulness the good things set before us,” I replied, with some presence of mind.  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” I added, to carry off my vivacity, “but I think informing conversation is a bore until after the nuts and raisins.  A Danish proverb says that he who knows what he is saying at a feast has but poor comprehension of what he is eating.  On my way hither, breakfasting at Strasburg, I enjoyed a lesson in geography, and I aver that though the lesson was elementary, I breakfasted very badly.”

[Illustration:  Delights of the VERLOBTEN.]

“Who was the teacher?” asked the explorer of Wyoming, a German, in the tone of a man to whom no professor of Geography could properly be a stranger.

“The teacher,” I answered with a smile, “was one Fortnoye—­”

I did not finish my sentence.  At that name, Fortnoye, a kind of electric movement was communicated around the board.  Every eye sought the face of Francine, who, troubled and confused, fell upon the cutlet placed before her and cut it feverishly into flinders.  Evidently there was a secret thereabouts.  When coffee was on, I applied myself to satisfying the topographic doubts of my neighbors, but the name of the geographical professor was approached no more.