“That’s like you,” she said; “but George Eliot had never met a man like you, poor thing, so she had to stick the real thing down to dogs.”

Septimus reddened.  “Dogs bark and keep one from sleeping,” he said.  “My next-door neighbor at the Hotel Godet has two.  An ugly man with a beard comes and takes them out in a motor car.  Do you know, I’m thinking of growing a beard.  I wonder how I should look in it?”

Emmy laughed and caught his sleeve.  “Why won’t you even let me tell you what I think of you?”

“Wait till I’ve grown the beard, and then you can,” said Septimus.

“That will be never,” she retorted; “for if you grow a beard, you’ll look a horror, like a Prehistoric Man—­and I sha’n’t have anything to do with you.  So I’ll never be able to tell you.”

“It would be better so,” said he.

They made many plans for settling down in some part of rural France or Switzerland—­they had the map of Europe to choose from—­but Septimus’s vagueness and a disinclination for further adventure on the part of Emmy kept them in Paris.  The winter brightened into spring, and Paris, gay in lilac and sunshine, held them in her charm.  There were days when they almost forgot, and became the light-hearted companions of the lame donkey on Nunsmere Common.

A day on the Seine, for instance, in a steamboat, when the water was miraculously turned to sparkling wine and the great masses of buildings were bathed in amber and the domes of the Pantheon and the Invalides and the cartouches and bosses of the Pont Alexandre III shone burnished gold.  There was Auteuil, with its little open-air restaurants, rustic trellis and creepers, and its friture of gudgeon and dusty salt and cutlery and great yards of bread, which Emmy loved to break with Septimus, like Christmas crackers.  Then, afterwards, there was the winding Seine again, Robinson Crusoe’s Island in all its greenery, and St. Cloud with its terrace looking over the valley to Paris wrapped in an amethyst haze, with here and there a triumphant point of glory.

A day also in the woods of Bas Meudon, alone beneath the trees, when they talked like children, and laughed over the luncheon basket which Madame Bolivard had stuffed full of electrifying edibles; when they lay on their backs and looked dreamily at the sky through the leaves, and listened to the chirrup of insects awakening from winter and the strange cracklings and tiny voices of springtide, and gave themselves up to the general vibration of life which accompanies the working of the sap in the trees.

Days, too, in mid-Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens, among the nursery maids and working folk; at cafes on the remoter boulevards, where the kindly life of Paris, still untouched by touristdom, passes up and down, and the spring gets into the step of youth and sparkles in a girl’s eyes.  At the window even of the appartement in the Boulevard Raspail, when the air was startlingly clear and scented and