“Wilhelm was again at her side, kneeling on the right, as Fritz on the left.  He was in bridegroom’s habit, and he offered a bouquet of graveyard-flowers—­the white immortelle and the forget-me-not.  When Fritz rose and put the ring on her finger she felt an icy hand draw the token off and replace it by another.  At this, overcome with terror, and making a wild gesture of rejection both to right and left, she ran shrieking out of the church.

“Such is the true and authentic story of Bettina,” concluded my narrator.  “You may see Bettina any day at Ettlingen, a yellow old maid forty years of age.  Every Sunday she goes to mass at Durlach, where she employs the rest of the day in tending flowers on a grave, the first grave in the line to the right of the gateway.”

I returned to the house with this grim and tender little idyll crooning through my brains.  I took my key and bed-candle, and asked the porter if a letter had arrived for me from Sylvester Berkley.  Not a line!  This silence became inconvenient.  Not only did I rely upon Berkley for my passport, the certificate of my character, but likewise for the revictualing of my purse.  As I passed the small throne-room of Francine, where she sat vis-a-vis with all her keys and bells, a light, a presence, an amicable little nod informed me that a friend was there for me, and sent a bath of warm and comfortable emotion all over my poor old heart.

[Illustration:  EFFUSION.]

It was late.  Francine, at a little velvet account-book, was executing some fairy-like and poetical arithmetic in purple ink.  I had the pleasure, before a half hour had passed, of making her commit more than one error in her columns, do violet violence to the neatness of her book, and adorn her thumb-nail with a comical tiny silhouette.  My gossip, which had this encouraging and proud effect, was commenced easily upon familiar subjects, such as the old rose-garden and the chickens, but branched imperceptibly into more personal confidences.  I found myself growing strangely confidential.  Soon I had sketched for Francine my life of opulent loneliness, my cook and my old valet, my philosopher’s den at Marly, my negligent existence at Paris, without family, country or obligations.

Her good gray eyes were swimming with tears, I thought.  With a look of perfect natural sweetness she said, “To live alone and far from kin and fatherland, that is not amusing.  It is like one of the small straight sticks of rose my father would take and plant in the sand in a far-away little red pot.”

A delicious vignette, I confess, began to be outlined in my fancy.  I cannot describe it, but I know Francine was in the middle repairing a stocking, while my own books and geographical notes, in a state of dustlessness they had never known actually, formed a brown bower around her.  Somewhere near, in an old secretary or in a grave, was buried the ideal of an earlier, haughtier love; wrapped up in a stolen ribbon or pressed in a book.