The day after Beauvouloir’s return he went to see his young master and blamed him gently for shutting himself up in a single room, pointing out to him the danger of leading a prison life in place of his former free life in the open air.

“But this air is vast,” replied Etienne.  “The spirit of my mother is in it.”

The physician prevailed, however, by the gentle influence of affection, in making Etienne promise that he would go out every day, either on the seashore, or in the fields and meadows which were still unknown to him.  In spite of this, Etienne, absorbed in his memories, remained yet another day at his window watching the sea, which offered him from that point of view aspects so various that never, as he believed, had he seen it so beautiful.  He mingled his contemplations with readings in Petrarch, one of his most favorite authors,—­him whose poesy went nearest to the young man’s heart through the constancy and the unity of his love.  Etienne had not within him the stuff for several passions.  He could love but once, and in one way only.  If that love, like all that is a unit, were intense, it must also be calm in its expression, sweet and pure like the sonnets of the Italian poet.

At sunset this child of solitude began to sing, in the marvellous voice which had entered suddenly, like a hope, into the dullest of all ears to music,—­those of his father.  He expressed his melancholy by varying the same air, which he repeated, again and again, like the nightingale.  This air, attributed to the late King Henri IV., was not the so-called air of “Gabrielle,” but something far superior as art, as melody, as the expression of infinite tenderness.  The admirers of those ancient tunes will recognize the words, composed by the great king to this air, which were taken, probably, from some folk-song to which his cradle had been rocked among the mountains of Bearn.

   “Dawn, approach,
    I pray thee;
  It gladdens me to see thee;
    The maiden
    Whom I love
  Is rosy, rosy like thee;
    The rose itself,
    Dew-laden,
  Has not her freshness;
    Ermine has not
    Her pureness;
    Lilies have not
    Her whiteness.”

After naively revealing the thought of his heart in song, Etienne contemplated the sea, saying to himself:  “There is my bride; the only love for me!” Then he sang too other lines of the canzonet,—­

   “She is fair
    Beyond compare,”—­

repeating it to express the imploring poesy which abounds in the heart of a timid young man, brave only when alone.  Dreams were in that undulating song, sung, resung, interrupted, renewed, and hushed at last in a final modulation, the tones of which died away like the lingering vibrations of a bell.