appeared to him; he saw once more her feeble smile, he heard her gentle voice; she bowed her head and wept.  The lights in the cottage were extinguished.  Etienne sang once more the pretty canzonet, with a new expression, a new meaning.  From afar Gabrielle again replied.  The young girl, too, was making her first voyage into the charmed land of amorous ecstasy.  That echoed answer filled with joy the young man’s heart; the blood flowing in his veins gave him a strength he never yet had felt, love made him powerful.  Feeble beings alone know the voluptuous joy of that new creation entering their life.  The poor, the suffering, the ill-used, have joys ineffable; small things to them are worlds.  Etienne was bound by many a tie to the dwellers in the City of Sorrows.  His recent accession to grandeur had caused him terror only; love now shed within him the balm that created strength; he loved Love.

The next day Etienne rose early to hasten to his old house, where Gabrielle, stirred by curiosity and an impatience she did not acknowledge to herself, had already curled her hair and put on her prettiest costume.  Both were full of the eager desire to see each other again,—­mutually fearing the results of the interview.  As for Etienne, he had chosen his finest lace, his best-embroidered mantle, his violet-velvet breeches; in short, those handsome habiliments which we connect in all memoirs of the time with the pallid face of Louis XIII., a face oppressed with pain in the midst of grandeur, like that of Etienne.  Clothes were certainly not the only point of resemblance between the king and the subject.  Many other sensibilities were in Etienne as in Louis XIII.,—­chastity, melancholy, vague but real sufferings, chivalrous timidities, the fear of not being able to express a feeling in all its purity, the dread of too quickly approaching happiness, which all great souls desire to delay, the sense of the burden of power, that tendency to obedience which is found in natures indifferent to material interests, but full of love for what a noble religious genius has called the “astral.”

Though wholly inexpert in the ways of the world, Gabrielle was conscious that the daughter of a doctor, the humble inhabitant of Forcalier, was cast at too great a distance from Monseigneur Etienne, Duc de Nivron and heir to the house of Herouville, to allow them to be equal; she had as yet no conception of the ennobling of love.  The naive creature thought with no ambition of a place where every other girl would have longed to seat herself; she saw the obstacles only.  Loving, without as yet knowing what it was to love, she only felt herself distant from her pleasure, and longed to get nearer to it, as a child longs for the golden grapes hanging high above its head.  To a girl whose emotions were stirred at the sight of a flower, and who had unconsciously foreseen love in the chants of the liturgy, how sweet and how strong must have been the feelings inspired in her breast the previous night by the sight of the young seigneur’s feebleness, which seemed to reassure her own.  But during the night Etienne had been magnified to her mind; she had made him a hope, a power; she had placed him so high that now she despaired of ever reaching him.